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"He wasn't telling her what the gods were, he was telling her what goodness was. To want other people to grow. To want other people to have all the good things that you have. And to spare them the bad things if you can. That was goodness."
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"The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary."

"We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own."

"One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself Which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker, there is not other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred."

"The monks used to say that he was more drawn to those who were more sinful, and the greater the sinner the more he loved him."

"He did not see at the moment how foolish it was for two of them to go on alone, nor did the King. They were too angry to think clearly. But much evil came of their rashness in the end."

"The outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality. Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?"

"No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior, by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol-cross or crescent or whatever-that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot teach man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral code and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope."
Explore more quotes by Orson Scott Card

"I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration."

"I imagine it feels like bathing in ice to the person touching her. But how does it feel to her? Cold as she is, it must surely burn like fire."

"The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together."

"Someone's senta loving note in lines of returning geese and as the moon fills my western chamber as petals dance over the flowing streama gain I think of you the two of us living a sadness apart a hurt that can't be removed yet when my gaze comes down my heart stays up."

"Quing-Jao: I am a slave to the gods, and I rejoice in it.Jane: A slave who rejoices is a slave indeed."

"Another oral exam, huh?' Peter said.'Shut up, Peter,' said Valentine.'You should relax and enjoy it,' said Peter. 'It could be worse.''I don't know how.''It could be an anal exam."

"Soldiers can sometimes make decisions that are smarter than the orders they've been given."

"I didn't want to kill them all. I didn't want to kill anybody! I'm not a killer! You didn't want me, you bastards, you wanted Peter, but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!"

"If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make... So-- as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of hour behavior are so complex that we can't trace them back. If you've got one line of dominoes knocking each other down, one by one, then you can always say, look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of dominoes that can be traced back in an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the causal chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to... Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society."
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