Orson Quotes & Sayings

Take myself as a good-will ambassador. I'm great - I'm taking myself as a character - for the intellectuals and the man on the street. I'm great where Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. leaves off. I'm
not so good with high society, in either North or South America, because I'm highly unconventional. Perhaps I bewilder people by being at once the esthete, the intellectual and the
vulgarian. — Orson Welles

He found himself filled with joy, for now his existence had a meaning. He had a future, because he was part of a world that had a future, and instead of wanting to decide for himself and determine that future for everyone else, he knew that he would be glad just to touch some small part of it. To marry and give happiness to his wife. To have a child and give it the same love that his parents gave him. To have a friend and ease his burdedn now and then. To have a skill or a secret and teach it to a student whose life might be changed a little by what he learned. Why had he dreamed of leading armies, whichwould accomplish nothing, when he could do these miraculous small things and change the world? — Orson Scott Card

I'm not a liar, sir,' she said.
'No, I'm sure you sincerely become whatever it is you're pretending to be. — Orson Scott Card

Who would expect less?" she said. " You're a Wiggin."
" Whatever that means." He said.
" It means that you are going to make a difference in the world. — Orson Scott Card

How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn. — Orson Scott Card

Perhaps you don't desire poetry as much as you would like to have my torchy knowledge of your possible futures, but I dare say poetry will do you far more good. For knowing the future only makes you timid and complacent by turns, while poetry can shape you into the kind of souls who can face any future with boldness and wisdom and nobility, so that you need not know the future at all, so that any future will be an opportunity for greatness, if you have greatness in you. — Orson Scott Card

[H]is 'philosophy' seemed to consist of anything that would be particularly annoying to the powers that be without being so shocking that they would fire him. He got the reputation among the students as an original and a rebel without having to pay the penalty for actually being either. — Orson Scott Card

Just as [he] had expected. The preacher retreated to authority as soon as he feared his ideas could not stand on their own merit. Reasonable argument was impossible when authority became the arbiter ... — Orson Scott Card

As long as you keep getting born, it's all right to die sometimes — Orson Scott Card

The only profit from their sojourn on Earth would be the memory of this mad species, which had somehow become intelligent without ever learning how to understand themselves. — Orson Scott Card

An eye for an eye? How Christian of you.'
Unbelievers always want other people to act like Christians. — Orson Scott Card

I designed Ender's Game to be as clear and accessible as any story of mine could possibly be. My goal was that the reader wouldn't
have to be trained in literature or even in science fiction to receive the tale in its simplest, purest form.
If everybody came to agree that stories should be told this clearly, the professors of literature would be out of a job, and the writers of obscure, encoded fiction would be, not honored, but pitied for their impenetrability. — Orson Scott Card

I have made an art form of the interview. The French are the best interviewers, despite their addiction to the triad, like all Cartesians. — Orson Welles

In a way she actually preferred Peter to other people because of this. He always acted out of intelligent self-interest. — Orson Scott Card

Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him. I act and give of myself as a man, but I register and receive with the soul of a woman. The only really good artists are feminine. I can't admit the existence of an artist whose dominant personality is masculine. — Orson Welles

Ah, Vitaly, we all come from Eros."
~Sel Menach — Orson Scott Card

You can't change what you don't understand. — Orson Scott Card

[Ruthie] ... if he was a good man, how could he leave me? So he must not be a good man. But if he isn't good, then why does it hurt so much to lose him? — Orson Scott Card

Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy. — Orson Welles

The only process you've mastered is the process of elimination, and the only reason you've mastered that is because you can do it in the toilet. — Orson Scott Card

The worst thing about the fantasies of the mentally ill is that they're so damned consistent. They never let up. They never give you any rest. — Orson Scott Card

Five chickens do not make a cow. — Orson Scott Card

All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe. — Orson Scott Card

If you listen very carefully, you can hear the good fairy come in the night and leave our assignment for tomorrow. — Orson Scott Card

Why do you say that I am alone? My body is with me wherever I am, telling me endless stories of hunger and satisfaction, weariness and sleep, eating and drinking and breathing and life. With such company who could ever be alone? — Orson Scott Card

If I ever own a restaurant, I will never allow the waiters to ask if the diners like their dishes. Particularly when they're talking. — Orson Welles

Twisted and perverse are the ways of the human mind," Jane intoned. "Pinocchio was such a dolt to try to become a real boy. He was much better off with a wooden head. — Orson Scott Card

I'm a lurid character! — Orson Welles

Isolation is the optimum environment for creativity. — Orson Scott Card

The spirit of the gospel is optimistic; it trusts in God and looks on the bright side of things. The opposite or pessimistic spirit drags men down and away from God, looks on the dark side, murmurs, complains, and is slow to yield obedience. — Orson F. Whitney

The piggies were not to be disturbed- — Orson Scott Card

Each atom of the Holy Spirit is intelligent, and like all other matter has solidity, form, and size, and occupies space. — Orson Pratt

When a brother is given the right to pass into the third life as a father, then he chooses his greatest rival or his truest friend to give him passage. You. Speaker - ever since I first learned Stark and read The Hive Queen and the Hegemon, I waited for you. I said many times to my father, Rooter, of all humans he is the one who will understand us. Then Rooter told me when your starship came, that it was you and the hive queen aboard that ship, and I knew then that you had come to give me passage, if only I did well."
"You did well, Human. — Orson Scott Card

There are times when you have to defend yourself or someone else against relentless evil. And some of those times the only defense that has any hope of succeeding is a one-time use of brutal, devastating force. At such times good people act brutally. — Orson Scott Card

There is nothing so important, so imperative, as the delivery of the divine message that has been entrusted to us. — Orson F. Whitney

Our Heavenly Father is far more merciful, infinitely more charitable, than even the best of his servants, and the Everlasting Gospel is mightier in power to save than our narrow finite minds can comprehend. — Orson F. Whitney

People will always go. Always. They always believe the can make a better life than in the old world.
What the hell, maybe they can. — Orson Scott Card

Wasn't that the definition of adulthood? That you wanted one thing, but did another because you knew what was right and good, and wanted to do the right and the good more than you wanted to do what you wanted. — Orson Scott Card

In fact she's a Baptist, which is almost like being Christian, only louder. — Orson Scott Card

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story. — Orson Welles

Doesn't it make you wonder about your own sexual identity, not to mention your sanity, that the two women you love are, respectively, a virtual woman existing only in the transient ansible connections between computers and a woman whose soul is in fact that of a man who is the husband of your mother? — Orson Scott Card

Knowledge is power, and all things are to be known in due season. But premature knowledge
knowing at the wrong time
is fatal both to progress and to happiness. — Orson F. Whitney

I love you Ender. More than ever. No matter what you decide. — Orson Scott Card

Do you think we're making a mistake?" snapped the Bishop.
"Not at all," said Dom Cristao. "I think we've taken a step toward something truly magnificent. But humankind almost never forgives true greatness."
"Fortunately," said the Bishop, "humankind isn't the judge that matters. And now I intend to pray for this boy, since medical science has obviously reached the boundary of its competence. — Orson Scott Card

I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment. — Orson Welles

to be deceived. You know why I am here." "Ah. I guess this means Dap filed a report. — Orson Scott Card

Sometimes good people have to do terrible things. — Orson Scott Card

Everything was a test. Or a lesson. Or a punishment from which he was supposed to learn a lesson, on which he would be tested later, and punished if he hadn't learned it. — Orson Scott Card

Are you asking us to impregnate all the females on all the ships with your DNA, so that you can be sure of having progeny?"
"No!" said Ram in horror. "What a terrible thing for a woman, to wake up pregnant- a violation of trust. It would destroy all nineteen colonies."
"Not to mention being embarrassing when all the babies look like you. — Orson Scott Card

I don't care how loyal you think you're going to be Dink. It's not in you. You're a brat and you always will be. So admit what a lousy follower you are and go ahead and LEAD.
-Petra — Orson Scott Card

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. — Orson Scott Card

And anyway most people are idiots. They don't care about the why. They only care about what threatens them. — Orson Scott Card

The two things you cannot do effectively on stage are pray and copulate. — Orson Welles

Endurance, after all, was a kind of victory; a kind of heroism, too. — Orson Scott Card

Bean sighed inwardly. It never failed. Whenever he had any conversation with Ender, it turned into an argument. — Orson Scott Card

For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are caught up in, or give shape to, the great events. — Orson Scott Card

As god is my witness, it was never my intent to throw out the constitution. I thought it was hanging by a thread, and I could save it ... You don't save it by cutting that thread. - President Nielson — Orson Scott Card

But now, well, he keeps telling me that solitude is the foundation of true wisdom, that all the brilliant thoughts in this house come as the desperate cry of one human being to another, saying, Know me, live with me in the world of my mind. — Orson Scott Card

Wang-mu fell silent, but not because she was embarrassed. She simply had nothing to say, and therefore said nothing. — Orson Scott Card

Mazer, i don't want to keep dreaming these things. I'm afraid to sleep. I keep thinking of things i don't want to remember. My whole life keeps playing out as if i were a recorder and someone else wanted to watch the most terrible parts of my life — Orson Scott Card

To stop a human being from doing something, you must find a way to make the person stop wanting to do it. — Orson Scott Card

The cinema has no boundary; it is a ribbon of dream. — Orson Welles

Mum worked as a secretary for Orson Welles for what sounded like a very miserable year. Her brother was the actor Jeremy Brett, who became famous for playing Sherlock Holmes. He was an absolutely lovely man. Very exciting and glamorous, he'd always make me feel amazing and full of confidence, like I'd picked the right thing to do in life. — Martin Clunes

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

Scholars don't have blood flowing in their veins," said Hamlet. "When they're wounded, they bleed logic, and when all of it is gone, their brains die, and they become ... soldiers. — Orson Scott Card

I am only what I remember. — Orson Scott Card

Yet even the most hackneyed, shopworn science fiction or fantasy tale will feel startling and fresh to a naive reader who doesn't know the milieu is just like the one used in a thousand other stories. — Orson Scott Card

He could just look at people and listen to them and suddenly he'd know things about them. — Orson Scott Card

A speaking, a crisis, people's lives in tatters, the future of the colony in doubt. And I cry in relief because an overblown computer program is speaking to me again, — Orson Scott Card

There's greatness in him. A magnitude of spirit. — Orson Scott Card

Whether he likes it or not, [he] cannot remain incognito forever. He has outraged too many wise men and pleased too many fools to hide behind his too-appropriate order to assume leadership of the forces of stupidity he has marshalled, or his enemies will unmask him in order to better understand the disease that has produced such a warped and twisted mind. — Orson Scott Card

So she retreated into herself, rebuilt the damaged pathways of her mind, explored long-unvisited memories, wandered among the trillions of human lives that were open to her observation, read over the libraries of every book known to exist in every language human beings had ever spoken. She created out of all this a self that was not utterly linked to Ender Wiggin, though she was still devoted to him, still loved him above any other living soul. Jane made herself into someone who could bear to be cut off from her lover, husband, father, child, brother, friend. — Orson Scott Card

In the dark, where do shadows go? — Orson Scott Card

Before we are citizens, we are children, and it is as children that we come to understand freedom and authority, liberty and duty. — Orson Scott Card

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 blessing upon the human race."
Ram thought about this for a moment, "I suppose that's what every adolescent male believes with his whole heart. — Orson Scott Card

Sometimes happiness consists of finding the right balance of misery. — Orson Scott Card

You deplore what I did, but you still want to know the results of my research. — Orson Scott Card

Like climbing a cliff, thinking is a perilous activity for those unused to it. — Orson Scott Card

I don't want to forgive myself. That's why I hate psychoanalysis I think if you're guilty of something you should live with it. Get rid of it - how can you get rid of a real guilt? I think people should live with it, face up to it. — Orson Welles

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 hushing sound of the toilet clearing; then Peter stood silhouetted in the doorway. He thinks I'm asleep. He's going to kill me. Peter walked to the bed, and sure enough, he did not lift himself up to his bed. Instead he came and stood by Ender's head. But he did not reach for a pillow to smother Ender. He did not have a weapon. He whispered, "Ender, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I know how it feels, I'm sorry, I'm your brother, I love you." A long time later, Peter's even breathing said that he was asleep. Ender peeled the bandaid from his neck. And for the second time that day he cried. — Orson Scott Card

It is my belief that many who think they dislike poetry are really poetical in their natures and are indebted to it, more than they imagine, for the success they may have achieved, even in practical pursuits, and for the enjoyment their lives have afforded them. — Orson F. Whitney

It is in the turmoil of chaos that we discover what, if anything, we are. — Orson Scott Card

A maimed bunny rabbit could pin me in under two seconds. I'm a lover, not a fighter. — Orson Scott Card

She paid using the prettiest credit card, and then left it with the ticket seller as a gift. Along with a minor curse - a bladder infection and diarrhea - just because she was Baba Yaga, and certain things were expected. — Orson Scott Card

If you get too slow, the listener's attention wanders and the information is lost. — Orson Scott Card

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 for satisfying hunger, without loyalty or honor or duty. — Orson Scott Card

So why don't you go home?"
Dink smiled crookedly. "Because I can't give up the game." He tugged at the fabric of his flash suit, which lay on the bunk beside him. "Because I love this. — Orson Scott Card

History is an omlette. THe eggs are already broken. — Orson Scott Card

Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. — Orson Scott Card

He toyed with the idea of trying to be like the other boys. But he couldn't think of any jokes, and none of theirs seemed funny. Wherever their laughter came from, Ender couldn't find such a place in himself. He was afraid, and fear made him serious. — Orson Scott Card

What else should you be? Human beings didn't evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing's the first thing we learned. And a good thing we did, or we'd be dead, and the tigers would own the earth. — Orson Scott Card

To keep dignity, and give honor when it's due, so that defeat is not disgrace. — Orson Scott Card

Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey. — Orson Scott Card

Bean also saw how the man's body moved inside his clothes, with a kind of contained strength that made his clothes seem like Kleenex, he could rip through the fabric just by tugging at it a little, because nothing could hold him in except his own self-control. — Orson Scott Card

Ela reached out for Grego. He refused to go to her. Instead he did exactly what Ender expected, what he had prepared for. Grego turned in Ender's relaxed grip, flung his arms around the neck of the speaker for the dead, and wept bitterly, hysterically. Ender spoke gently to the others, who watched helplessly. "How could he show his grief to you, when he thought you hated him?" "We never hated Grego," said Olhado. "I should have known," said Miro. "I knew he was suffering the worst pain of any of us, but it never occurred to me . . ." "Don't blame yourself," said Ender. "It's the kind of thing that only a stranger can see." He heard Jane whispering in his ear. "You never cease to amaze me, Andrew, the way you turn people into plasma. — Orson Scott Card

There's no need to legalize gay marriage. I have plenty of gay friends who are committed couples; some of them call themselves married, some don't, but their friends treat them as married. Anybody who doesn't like it just doesn't hang out with them. — Orson Scott Card

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose. — Orson Welles

By nature, I am an experimentalist. I don't believe much in accomplishment. — Orson Welles

There is only one way into the Kingdom of Heaven, but there are many ways into the human heart: and the Church of Christ, ln its mission of promulgating truth and turning souls of righteousness, has legitimate use for every avenue of the heart. — Orson F. Whitney

I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts. — Orson Welles