He lay in bed staring upward into the darkness. On the bunk above him, he could hear Peter turning and tossing restlessly. Then Peter slid off the bunk and walked out of the room. Ender heard the hush...
He couldn't go into his army's barracks -- he had long since learned that the best commanders stay away unless they have some reason to visit. The boys have to have a chance to be at peace, at rest, w...
Happiness can depend as easily on useless things as on useful ones.
Good people aren't good because they never cause harm to others. They're good because they treat others the best way they know how, with the understanding that they have.
Every time, I've won because I could understand the way my enemy though. From what they did. I could tell what they though I was doing, how they wanted the battle to take shape. And I played off of th...
Ender was a destroyer, but what he destroyed was illusion, and the illusion had to die...the truth about ourselves. Somehow this ancient man is able to see the truth and it doesn't blind his eyes or d...
Ender mentally added him to his private list of people who also qualified as human beings.
Earthborn animals do this thing, inside their brains—a sort of firing-off of synapses, controlled insanity. While they’re asleep. The part of their brain that records sight or sound, it’s firing off e...
Come into our home, daughters of Earth; dwell in our tunnels, harvest our fields; what we cannot do, you are now our hands to do for us. Blossom, trees; ripen, fields; be warm for them, suns; be ferti...
Ulysses was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it.
The only people who ever prize purity of ignorance are those who profit from a monopoly on knowledge.
It’s often the ideas that sound most absurd and counterintuitive at first that later cause fundamental shifts in the way we see the world.
You accomplish exactly as much as the people who serve you decide you'll accomplish, and nothing more.
When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.
When there aren’t any smart decisions, I suppose you just have to pick the stupid decision you like best.
Whatever your gravity is when you get to the door, rememberthe enemy's gate is .If you step through your own door like you're out for a stroll, you're a big target and you deserve to get hit. With mor...
The trouble with coins is, when one face is up, the other face is down.
The strangest thing about humans is the way they pair up, males and females. Constantly at war with each other, never content to leave each other alone. They never seem to grasp the idea that males an...
The criminal misuse of time was pointing out the mistakes. Catching themnoticing themthat was essential. If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you...
The Nordic language recognizes four orders of foreignness. The first is the otherlander, or utlänning, the stranger that we recognize as being a human of our world, but of another city or country. The...