“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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“The Golden Light that will be diffused throughout all the happy world from the rays of the risen sun of Socialism.”
― Robert Tressell, quote from The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
“I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.”
― John Cheever, quote from The Stories of John Cheever
“Puck laughed, and it wasn't like that weird high-pitched giggle she'd heard out of children before, the one that begged the question: why would one possibly tickle a child just to elicit that noise? ”
― Kresley Cole, quote from Kiss of a Demon King
“I'm a writer and I'm feeling like death, as you would too if you'd just flown into Grand Rapids, Michigan at some ungodly hour of the morning only to discover that you can't get into your hotel room for another three hours. In fact it's enough just to have flown into Grand Rapids, Michigan. If you are a native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, then please assume that I am just kidding. Anyone else will surely realise that I am not.
Having nowhere else to go, I am standing up, leaning against a mantelpiece. Well, a kind of mantelpiece. I don't know what it is, in fact. It's made of brass and some kind of plastic and was probably drawn in by the architect after a nasty night on the town. That reminds me of another favourite piece of information: there is a large kink in the trans-Siberian railway because when the Czar (I don't know which Czar it was because I am not in my study at home I'm leaning against something shamefully ugly in Michigan and there are no books) decreed that the trans-Siberian railway should be built, he drew a line on a map with a ruler. The ruler had a nick in it.”
― Douglas Adams, quote from The Salmon of Doubt
“I like to know what I'm celebrating before I put on a party hat.”
― Margaret Peterson Haddix, quote from Into the Gauntlet
Noughts & Crosses
The Scorpio Races
Torn
The Last Temptation...
The Children of Húri...
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