"Do not shout at me, Mr. Quill," said John [Adams]. "Justice may be blind, but she is not deaf."

"These children had never looked death in the face and then chosen to live anyway."

"Carn Carby left, and ender mentally added him to his private list of people who also qualified as human beings."

"...you seemed to be listening to me, not to find out useful information, but to try to catch me in a logical fallacy. This tells us all that you are used to being smarter than your teachers, and that you listen to them in order to catch them making mistakes and prove how smart you are to the other students. This is such a pointless, stupid way of listening to teachers that it is clear you are going to waste months of our time before you finally catch on that the only transaction that matters is a transfer of useful information from adults who possess it to children who do not, and that catching mistakes is a criminal misuse of time."

"I came because I've spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore."

"A minor request," said Mazer. "Let's not refer to it as the training cage. 'Training' sounds laborious and regimented. Soldiers groan at the word. These men joined the IF to fight, sir. Let's call it the Battle Room."

"So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth."

"One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself."

"He had so much damn respect he wanted to scream."

"If he did not speak his tale, it grew dank and musty, it shrank inside him, while with the telling the tale stayed fresh and virtuous."

"In Russia you learn patience," said Ivan. "In America you learn action."

"You're a monster.Thanks. Does this mean I get a raise?No, just a medal. The budget isn't inexhaustable."

"Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books."

"Poke had never shared out so many raisins, because she had never had so many to share. But the little kids wouldn't understand that. They'd think, Poke gave us garbage, and Achilles gave us raisins. That's because they were stupid."

"Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice."

"Home is anywhere that you know all your friends and all your enemies."

"I'll go from world to world until I find a time and place where you can come awake in safety. And I'll tell your story to my people, so that perhaps in time the can forgive you, too. The way that you've forgiven me."

"My mind, my logical, practical, reasoning mind, is peeing in his mind pants."

"It didn't matter he was brilliant and dedicated and good. He was a child. He was young.No he isn't, thought Ender. Small, yes. Bur Bean has been through a battle with a whole army depending on him and on the soldiers that he led. and he performed splendidly, and the won. There's no youth in that. No childhood."

"I carry the seeds of death within me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love."

"You're not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for the greater you are."

"Then, as Father had trained him, Rigg thought past his feelings."

"Working is hard and distracts from having fun."

"Of course, he didn't know anything about these Indonesians, or why they would have been there at this moment to save his life, but the fact that they had guns and weren't firing them at him implied that for the moment, at least, they were his dearest friends."

"Are you all right, Sir?" asked Hezekiah."Just fighting over old battles in my mind," said John. "It's the problem with age. You have all these rusty arguments, and no quarrel to use them in. My brain is a museum, but alas, I'm the only visitor, and even I am not terribly interested in the displays."Hezekiah laughed, but there was affection in it. "I would love nothing better than to visit there. But I'm afraid I'd be tempted to loot the place, and carry it all away with me."

"Order and disorder', said the speaker, 'they each have their beauty."

"Being here alone with nothing to do, I've been thinking about myself too. Trying to understand why I hate myself so badly."

"Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we WERE there, and during the time we lived, we were alive. That's the truth - what is, what was, what will be - not what could be, what should have been, what never can be."

"In fact she's a Baptist, which is almost like being Christian, only louder."

"Human: That's stupid. Isn't there grass on both sides?"

"It was not about physical strength, Wit reminded himself. It was 90 percent mental, 10 percent physical. That's what the SEAL instructors were looking for: men and women who could disregard the pleadings of the body. Pain was nothing, sleep was nothing. What was chaffed skin, wrecked muscles, bleeding sores? The body chooses to be sore. The body chooses to be exhausted. But the SEAL mind rejects it. The SEAL mind commands the body, not the other way around."

"Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you."

"The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them."

"Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to."

"For the first time in his life, a teacher was pointing out things that Ender had not already seen for himself. For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire."

"He woke up and fought another battle and won. Then he went to bed and slept again and dreamed again and then he woke up and won again and slept again and he hardly noticed when waking became sleeping. Nor did he care."

"As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers, I am also, for good or ill, an American writing American literature to an American audience. Most fundamentally, though, I am a human being writing human literature to a human audience."

"There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good,' to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community."

"I'll become exactly the tool you want me to be, said Ender silently, but at least I wont be fooled into it. I'll do it because I choose to, not because you tricked me, you sly bastard."

"You will soon learn that there ARE no strange stars, no alien skies"- No?"Only skies and stars, in all their varieties. Each one with its own flavour, and all flavours good"- Now YOU think like a tree. Flavours! Of skies!"I have tasted the heat of many stars, and all of them were sweet."

"The devil? Jason heaved the tick over his shoulder like a collier with his sack. "Satan. The adversary. The enemy of the plan of God. The undoer. The destroyer. Yes. He definitely was. Jason smiled. "But he meant well."

"But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now - partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore."

"We don't punish the ones who fail. They just-don't go on."

"A man without a wife and babies is a menace to civilization... One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war."

"That's the problem with winning right from the start, thought Ender. you lose friends."

"I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares."

"Because human nature never changes."

"That's what Father and Mother are, thought Nafai. They stay together, not because of any gain, but because of the gift. Father doesn't stay with Mother because she is good for him, but rather because together they can do good for us, and for many others."

"There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever."

"They must talk to each other directly, Ender, mind to mind. What one thinks, another can also think; what one remembers, another can also re-member. Why would they ever develop language? Why would they ever learn to read and write? How would they know what reading and writing were if they saw them? Or signals? Or numbers? Or anything that we use to communicate? This isn't just a matter of translating from one language to another. They don't have a language at all. We used every means we could think of to communicate with them, but they don't even have the machinery to know we're signaling. And maybe they've been trying to think to us, and they can't understand why we don't respond."