Before we are citizens, he thought, we are children, and it is as children that we come to understand freedom and authority, liberty and duty. I have done my duty. I have bowed to authority. Mostly. A...
Be proud, Bonito, pretty boy. You can go home and tell your father, Yes, I beat up Ender Wiggin, who was barely ten years old, and I was thirteen. And I had only six of my friends to help me, and some...
Asking a man if he could be trusted was like asking an unwed girl if she was a virgin. The question mattered, but the asking of it was gross insult.
As long as you keep getting born, it's all right to die sometimes
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 t...
And that's as sure as we ever are of anything. We believe it enough to act as though it's true. When we'r'e that sure, we call it knowledge. Facts. We bet our lives on it.
Americans love to pick up, move on, start over. But instead of being somebody fresh and new, they become somebody lonely and lost, or, far too often these days, they become nobody at all, a machine fo...
A real god doesn’t care about control. A real god already has control of everything that needs controlling. Real gods would want to teach you how to be just like them.
A non-materialist. And yet you are unpleasantly fat. A gluttonous ascetic? Such a contradiction.
It's so easy, when you never meet people, when you never know the Earth itself... it's easy to forget why Earth is worth saving. Why the world of people might be worth the price you pay.
The cruelest, narrowest, most evil people will always rise to power because they'll always be the ones most willing to wrap themselves in the crescent flag and murder people in God's name.
It was all your genes that made us geniuses, mom. said peter. we sure didn't get any from dad.i heard that. father said, not looking up from the news that was being displayed on the table while he ate...
Because if you can’t kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.
All the others knew that he had a mind, knew that he was capable of understanding ideas. What will new people think when they see me? They’ll see a body that’s already atrophying, hunched over; they’l...
Your ego-depletion seems problematically difficult to assuage.
You're cultural supremacists to the core. You'll perform your Questionable Activities to help out the poor little piggies, but there isn't a chance in the world you'll notice when they have something...
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...
What did this portend? He still breathed, the instruments did not change, his heart beat on. But he called to Peter. Did this mean that he longed to live the life of his child of the mind, Young Peter...
What I want, he said softly, is to stand in this meadow and walk in the light of the sun.
We've decided that your birthday present will be a car, said Marion.Danny was touched. But the thing I can't figure out is, why would I need a new car?You can't very well gate a girl to the movies, Da...