If you give orders and explain nothing, you might get obedience, but you'll get no creativity. If you tell them your purpose, then when your original plan is shown to be faulty, they'll find another w...
If desire did not dim the brain, nobody would ever get married, drunk, or fat.
If I wanted to doubt, then I could doubt endlessly ... but at some point a person has to stop questioning and act, and at that point you have to trust something to be true. You have to act as if somet...
I'm just saying that I...I regret that everybody else has nineteen chances, and only I am limited to a single chance for my genes to continue.Because you believe your genes would confer a great blessi...
I would have the taste of poison in my mouth all the days of my life, if I went back home and pretended to be what I was before.
I spend all my time thinking things through. It’s acting on my thoughts that gets tricky. Which ones should I act on, and which ones should I ignore?
I never went to the priests to confess, she said, because I knew they would despise me for my sin. Yet when you named all my sins today, I could bear it because I knew you didn’t despise me. I couldn’...
I know, you've been here a year, you think these people are normal. Well, they're not. WE'RE not. I look in the library, I call up books on my desk. Old ones, because they won't let us have anything n...
I know everything I need to know already, Rigg always said... To which Father always replied,See how ignorant you are? You don't even know why you need to know the things you don't know yet. So tell m...
I had no idea we planned to be so ruthless.It was not publicized or even discussed with the political arm of the colonization program. Ruthlessness was necessary but wins no votes.But this is not our...
I don't care if I pass your test, I don't care if I follow your rules. If you can cheat, so can I. I won't let you beat me unfairly - I'll beat you unfairly first.- Ender
I divide officers into four classes—the clever, the lazy, the stupid, and the industrious. The man who is clever and lazy is fit for the very highest commands. He has the temperament and the requisite...
I could become a businessman and run some big corporation, I'd scramble and maneuver until I was at the top of everything and what would I have? Nothing.
I am a Gordian knot. Don't unravel, just slice.
Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, then happiness as we can manage it.
Human beings are just machines, Petra knew that, machines that do what you want them to do, if you only know the levers to pull. And no matter how complex people might seem, if you just cut them off f...
He did what he thought was right,
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...
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.
From now on the enemy is more clever than you. From now on the enemy is stronger than you. From now on you are always about to lose.