“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
“Just wanted you to know, there’s been no . . . funny business between me and your mam. No . . . hanky-panky, if you know what I mean?” For”
― John Flanagan, quote from Slaves of Socorro
“Keşke imkân olsaydı da (ki insan tabiatı için bu asla mümkün değildir) herkes, hepimiz, benliğimizin en gizli köşelerini olduğu gibi açığa vurabilseydik; başkalarına, hatta en yakın dostlarımıza, sırası gelince kendimize bile itiraf etmekten çekindiğimiz ne varsa, hepsini korkmadan ortaya dökebilseydik, dünyayı saracak pis kokudan hepimiz boğulurduk. Parantez içinde söyleyeyim, toplumu düzenleyen yasalar, görgü kuralları bu bakımdan iyidir zaten. Derin bir fikir gizlidir bunlarda; ahlaki olduğu iddia edilemeyecek ama, koruyucu, bize rahatlık sağlayan bir fikir. Bu da azımsanmamalı, çünkü ahlak da rahatlıktan başka bir şey değildir, yani rahatımız için icat edilmiştir. …Son olarak şunu söyleyeyim: Kusurlarımı, ahlaksızlığımı, sefihliğimi başıma kakıyorsunuz; oysa bütün suçum başkalarından daha içten olmam, o kadar. Demin de dediğim gibi, başkalarının kendilerinden bile sakladığı gerçekleri ben açıkça ortaya döküyorum.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Ezilenler
“In the trinity of skin, bones, and brown water, men and women lose all difference.”
― Herta Müller, quote from Atemschaukel
“It's a rotten job, but somebody's got to do it.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Seven Dials Mystery
“Our feet whispered through the grass as fireflies flickered in slow circles around”
― Emily Bleeker, quote from When I'm Gone
BookQuoters 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.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.