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Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me—to find out what you're good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools.

Orson Scott Card

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Orson Scott Card
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: August 24
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Richland
Washington
Brian Green
Frederick Bliss
Byron Walley
Scott Richards
Dinah Kirkham
P.Q. Gump
Byron S. Walley
Might
Humankind
Human
Tools
Humans
Except
Needs
Beings
Something
Humanity
Good
Maybe
Ender
Things
Free
Survives
Find
Despicable

More quotes by Orson Scott Card

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Of course, I also hear from critics who detest what I do, and while sometimes I feel rather proud of having made various the loathsome people or groups angry, at other times I wonder why I put up with such grief.
Orson Scott Card
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Nobodys life ever goes according to plan. So why do we keep on planning? Because that's how we know who we are. By what we intend to be. By what we try to become. And fail. I don't say 'fail'. I saw we aim and miss. But we still hit something.
Orson Scott Card
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...the thing with brothers is, you're supposed to take turns being the keeper. Sometimes you get to sit down and be the brother who is kept.
Orson Scott Card
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That's how it goes within a family. You think you know each other so well, and so you don't bother hardly getting to know each other at all.
Orson Scott Card
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A rustic setting always suggests fantasy to suggest science fiction, you need sheet metal and plastic. You need rivets.
Orson Scott Card
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For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are caught up in, or give shape to, the great events.
Orson Scott Card
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Reasonable argument is impossible when authority becomes the arbiter.
Orson Scott Card
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The only way to retrieve a secret,once known, is to replace it with a lie.
Orson Scott Card
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One mind can think only of its own questions it rarely surprises itself.
Orson Scott Card
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You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knos waht warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure youo didn't know. You were reckless and brilliant and young. It's waht you were born for.
Orson Scott Card
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Make friends. Be a leader. Kiss butts if you have to, but if the other guys despise you-you know what I mean?
Orson Scott Card
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There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.
Orson Scott Card
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In philosophy class I think we finally decided that 'good' is an infinitely recursive term - it can't be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it's better than bad, though why it's better to be good than bad depends on how you define good, and on and on.
Orson Scott Card
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Truth, when we are fortunate enough to find it, is like bad-tasting medicine. It rarely comes as a pleasant surprise, because if it surprises us, it means we've been denying it for some time and have a lot of beliefs based on falsehood. It's hard to give up those beliefs.
Orson Scott Card
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Maybe we're the fools, for thinking we know things. Maybe humans are the only ones who can deal with the fact that nothing can ever be known at all.
Orson Scott Card
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Human beings are free except when humanity needs them.
Orson Scott Card
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I don't believe that there are aliens. I believe there are really different people.
Orson Scott Card
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What am I now, Alai? Still good. At what? At--anything. There's a million soldiers who'd follow you to the end of the universe. I don't want to go to the end of the universe. So where do you want to go? They'll follow you. I want to go home, thought Ender, but I don't know where it is.
Orson Scott Card
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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
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You take a step, then another. That's the journey. But to take a step with your eyes open is not a journey at all, it's a remaking of your own mind.
Orson Scott Card