“Personal affection is a luxury you can have only after all your enemies are eliminated. Until then, everyone you love is a hostage, sapping your courage and corrupting your judgment.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Empire
“Being young is an 18 year prison sentence for a crime your parents committed. But you do get time off for good behavior.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Empire
“The society whose citizens are willing to stand and fight is the one with the best chance of surviving long enough for history to even notice.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Empire
“Armies have spent a lot of time and effort training their soldiers not to think of the enemy as human beings. It’s so much easier to kill them if you think of them as dangerous animals. The trouble is, war isn’t about killing. It’s about getting the enemy to stop resisting your will. Like training a dog not to bite. Punishing him leaves you with a beaten dog. Killing him is a permanent solution, but you’ve got no dog. If you can understand why he’s biting and remove the conditions that make him bite, sometimes that can solve the problem as well. The dog isn’t dead. He isn’t even your enemy.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Empire
“The problem with elections is that anybody who wants an office badly enough to run for it probably shouldn’t have it. And anybody who does not want an office badly enough to run for it probably shouldn’t have it, either. Government office should be received like a child’s Christmas present, with surprise and delight. Instead it is usually received like a diploma, an anticlimax that never seems worth the struggle to earn it.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Empire
“A good working definition of fanaticism is that you are so convinced of your views and policies that you are sure that anyone who opposed them must be either stupid and decieved or have some ulterior motive. We are today a nation where almost everyone in the public eye displays fanaticism with every utterance.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Empire
“All the common people want is to be left alone. All the ordinary soldier wants is to collect his pay and not get killed. That's why the great forces of history can be manipulated by astonishingly small groups of determined people.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Empire
“We live in a time when moderates are treated worse than extremists, being punished as if they were more fanatical than the actual fanatics.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Empire
“You don't know who a person is until you see how he acts when given unexpected power. He hasn't rehearsed for the part. So what you see is what he is.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Empire
“Child-rearing today was so complicated. You always had to think of what they'd say on television later.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Empire
“As god is my witness, it was never my intent to throw out the constitution. I thought it was hanging by a thread, and I could save it... You don't save it by cutting that thread. - President Nielson”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Empire
“My husband is a good man," she said. "It's important to him to be a good man. He has to not only be good, he has to believe that he's good. In the eyes of God, in my eyes, in his parents' eyes, in his own eyes. Good.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Empire
Orson Scott Card
Born place: in Richland, Washington, The United States
Born date August 24, 1951
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“Some people have an enormous capacity for feeling guilt, deserved or otherwise.”
― Scott Hawkins, quote from The Library at Mount Char
“It gave me hope: if you could make a beautiful piece of art from discarded newspapers and old matchbooks, then it meant that everything had potential. And maybe people were like collages--no matter how broken or useless we felt, we were an essential part of the whole. We mattered.”
― Heather Demetrios, quote from I'll Meet You There
“Hope not built on reason brings disappointment only.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, quote from The Mistress of Spices
“It's a wisdom that comes from seeing how things work. Things you want to happen always take a long time.' She pointed one little finger at the meech dragon and shook it in his face. 'You may read books and know bunches, but I have lived life longer than you.”
― Donita K. Paul, quote from DragonQuest
“For reasons he had never understood, she read a different newspaper each morning, spanning the political spectrum from right to left, and languages from French to English. Years ago, when he had first met her and understood her even less, he had asked about this. Her response, he came to realize only years later, made perfect sense: ‘I want to see how many different ways the same lies can be told.’ Nothing he had read in the ensuing years had come close to suggesting that her approach was wrong.”
― Donna Leon, quote from Death at La Fenice
Just Breathe
Very Good, Jeeves!
Rabbit Redux
When the Emperor Was...
Hungry for You
Mark of the DemonBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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