Orson Scott Card - People Quotes

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I'm passing through the world invisibly. Even when people see or speak to me it's as if I didn't exist, as if I had no right to exist. I tread across their lands and they don't see me. I act and act and act and nothing makes any difference in the world. But they touch me.

Orson Scott Card
Once you have the gallows, you'll find new reasons to hang people from it.

Orson Scott Card
Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.

Orson Scott Card
It's about me, or people wouldn't be so anxious to keep me from knowing about it. The absence of information is information.

Orson Scott Card
You think this because you are a nasty person by nature, Calvin, and you don't understand nice people. To you, the end of existence is to control things, and so you will never build anything, but rather will try to take control of what is already in existence. Your brother, though, is by nature a Maker, as you explain it; therefore he cares nothing about who rules, but only about what exists.

Orson Scott Card
Just because you live every waking moment with dreams of controlling other people doesn't mean the rest of us do.

Orson Scott Card
Don't you think it's ironic that you have no idea what you're supposed to do, said Verily, and yet so many people have gone to so much trouble to prevent you from doing it?

Orson Scott Card
Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you.

Orson Scott Card
You were born with compassion, only that also means that when people are cruel to you it cuts you deep. You won't understand that you have to walk right up to the ones who are being hateful and laugh in their faces and earn their respect. Instead you'll try to figure out what you did to make them mad at you.

Orson Scott Card
The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.

Orson Scott Card
The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who've forgotten their own childhood.

Orson Scott Card
In a way she actually preferred Peter to other people because of this. He always acted out of intelligent self-interest.

Orson Scott Card
The dreamers always seem to think their dream is worth the price that other people will pay. They also delude themselves that they will control whatever evil they use to try to bring about their dream.

Orson Scott Card
People love to hear the brag of the local boy, because they want him to be great, but the foreigner must deny that he has any outstanding virtue - this is what will endear him to the locals.

Orson Scott Card
You as stupid as they come. Of course, I say this with your best interests at heart. Most people are stupid. I don't hold it against them.

Orson Scott Card
That's what so many people didn't understand about life. The real world is the one within the walls of homes; the outside world, of careers and politics and money and fame, that was the fake world, where nothing lasted, and things were real only to the extent they harmed or helped people inside their homes.

Orson Scott Card
A liar sees lies, said Taleswapper. Even when they aren't there. Just as a hypocrite sees hypocrites whenever he runs across good people. Can't stand to think that anyone might really be what you only pretend to be.

Orson Scott Card
There were crimes and quarrels, alongside kindness and cooperation; there were people who loved each other and people who did not; it was a human world.

Orson Scott Card
I don't know why people who got what they need to be happy don't just go ahead and be happy.

Orson Scott Card
And what? What's the other choice? To passively let things happen and then say: "Tut-tut, what at botch that was"? Don't we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don't we try to frame it so they'll chose as we think they should?

Orson Scott Card
Sometimes those who care for the whole community must act in a way that harms the individual. For a good man it never becomes easy and he avoids it when he can; but when people need him to be harsh, he will be harsh indeed, and he won't shrink from it, he'll do it with his own hand and let it be known what he does.

Orson Scott Card
To me, the truth is what actually happened. Yet it is impossible to know anything approaching the whole truth about past events. Even the people living them could not possibly understand. That truth is always out of reach.

Orson Scott Card
When people say perhaps it's cause they're lying. Either they don't believe the thing they're saying, or they do believe it only they don't want to admit they do.

Orson Scott Card
People above you, they never want to share power with you. Why you look to them? They give you nothing. People below you, you give them hope, you give them respect, they give you power, cause they don't think they have any, so they don't mind giving it up.

Orson Scott Card
You are not what you seem.
So many people have said that that I'm beginning to think that's precisely how I do seem. What is it I seem to be that you have now discovered that I'm not?

Orson Scott Card
There's some people who do things so bad it tears the fabric of the world, and then there's some people so sweet and good that they can feel it when the world gets torn. They see things, they know things, only they're so good and pure that they don't understand what it is that they're seeing.

Orson Scott Card
Wishful thinking gives false gods to people who hunger for gods, but those who yearn for a world with no gods are no less likely to fall victim to their own wishful thinking.

Orson Scott Card
"I think that I say those things that make people so angry, not because I really mean them, but because I simply thought of a clever way to say them. It's a kind of art, to think of the perfect way to say an idea, and when you think of it then you have to say it, because words don't exist until you say them."
"A pretty feeble kind of art, Nyef, and I say you should give it up before it gets you killed."

Orson Scott Card
Physically plain people are perfectly able to see physical beauty in others, while people who are morally maimed are blind to goodness and decency. They honestly think it doesn't exist.
Oh, they know it exists all right. They just never know which people have it.

Orson Scott Card
You looked so intense. Whatever you were saying, you seemed to mean it, and it wasn't amusing at all. Started quite a fashion. People keep looking for purpose now. Complicates everything.

Orson Scott Card