Orson Scott Card - Truth Quotes

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You speak metaphorically, I hope, said Peggy.
I hope not, said Becca. Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

Orson Scott Card
Money only buys the illusion of power. Real power is in the force of will — will strong enough that others bend to it for its own sake, and follow it willingly. Power that is won through deception will evaporate under the hot light of truth.

Orson Scott Card
The first of a thousand lies. Truth flowed to Micah Quill, was sucked in and disappeared, and emerged again looking ever so much like it used to, but changed subtly, at the edges, where none would notice, so that simple truth became a complicated fabric indeed, one that could wrap you up so tightly and close you off from the air until you suffocated in it.

Orson Scott Card
You never needed anybody.
If you had ever bothered to come to know me, you'd know that that is the exact opposite of the truth.
Well, well. So we part in utter ignorance of each other.

Orson Scott Card
So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.

Orson Scott Card
Everybody thinks they want to see the truth, said Tenkswa-Tawa. That's one of the lies we tell ourselves.

Orson Scott Card
But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.

Orson Scott Card
Wasn't that their natural right, to know the truth so as to be able to let the truth lead them to do good or evil, as they chose?

Orson Scott Card
Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we WERE there, and during the time we lived, we were alive. That's the truth - what is, what was, what will be - not what could be, what should have been, what never can be.

Orson Scott Card
I'm a terrible salesman, he finally said. I always tell the truth about what I'm selling, and then nobody buys it.

Orson Scott Card
Knowing something may be a terrible burden to bear, but it holds no danger to them as aren't afraid of truth.

Orson Scott Card
It's all just fictions anyway. We do what we do and then we make up reasons for it afterward but they're never the true reasons, the truth is always just out of reach.

Orson Scott Card
Ender nodded. It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn't hurt a bit. But since adults always said it when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.

Orson Scott Card
America's intellectual community has never been very bright. Or honest. They're all sheep, following whatever the intellectual fashion of the decade happens to be. Demanding that everyone follow their dicta in lockstep. Everyone has to be open-minded and tolerant of the things they believe, but God forbid they should ever concede, even for a moment, that someone who disagrees with them might have some fingerhold of truth.

Orson Scott Card
Everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth.

Orson Scott Card
Ender understood more than she said. Manipulation of gravity was one thing; deception by the officers was another; but the most important message was this: the adults are the enemy, not the other armies. They do not tell us the truth.

Orson Scott Card
No man can bear to live with a woman who speaks nothing but the truth to him.

Orson Scott Card
I'm neutral on lying, seeing as how there's times when the truth just hurts people.

Orson Scott Card
Nobody ever completely means what they say. Even when they think they're telling the truth, there's always something hidden behind their words.

Orson Scott Card
When both parties are lying and they both know the other party's lying, it comes powerful close to being the same thing as telling the truth.

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 you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed.

Orson Scott Card
Individual human beings are all tools, that the others use to help us all survive. That's a lie. No. It's just a half truth. You can worry about the other half after we win this war.

Orson Scott Card