Orson Scott Card

We knew everything there was to know before... Now we discover that there are so many ways of knowing the same things that we'll never find them all.

Every day all people judge all other people. The question is whether we judge wisely.

Even if the vast majority of them are wrong, even if ninety-nine of every hundred is stupid and wrong, out of ten thousand ideas that still leaves them with a hundred good ones. That’s how they make up for being so stupid and having such short lives and small memories.

I’m trying to conceive of something inconceivable. I'm trying to find answers to questions that humans beings have never even tried to ask.

There can be no greater honor to a parent than to have a child who is greater.

I suspect there may be someone who cares what happens to us. That's one step better than merely wishing. And one step below hoping.

The mob still had anger in it, some of them at least. Yet there were so many who were sick of it all, many who were already ashamed, already discovering in their hearts the terrible acts they had performed tonight, when their souls were given over to the will of the mob.

If you think that everybody around you is a puppet, why bother talking to them at all? Why even try to plan anything or create anything, since everything you plan or create or desire or dream of is just acting out the script your puppeteer built into you?

Who is more cursed, the one who dies, unknowing until the very moment of his death or the one who watched his destruction as it approached, step by step, for days and weeks and years?

We spend our lives guessing at what's going on inside everybody else, and when we happen to get lucky and guess right, we think we "understand." Such nonsense. Even a monkey at a computer will type a word now and then.

He had the decency to be appalled by his own brutality.

Only you have the power to kill me completely. Only you have the power to make it so my death means nothing, so that all my people die after me and there is no one left to remember. Why shouldn't I leave my testament with you alone? Only you will decide whether or not it has any worth.