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

When you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely. But when the other person doesn’t yet know that he needs your wisdom you keep it to yourself. Food only...

A Great Rabbi stands, teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife’s adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death.There is...

While you’re governing the colony and I’m writing political philosophy, They’ll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other’s room and play checkers and have pillow fights.

You take a step, then another. That’s the journey. But to take a step with your eyes open is not a journey at all, it’s a remaking of your own mind.

I’m hurting you to make you a better soldier in every way. To sharpen your wit. To intensify your effort. To keep you off balance, never sure what’s going to happen next, so you always...

But in the military you don’t get trusted positions just because of your ability. You also have to attract the notice of superior officers. You have to be liked. You have to fit in with...

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...

So I don’t even get a chance to learn before I’m being judged.

Maybe that’s all demons ever are. People like us, doing things without even knowing what we’re doing.

But it was not the boyish grin she had known when he bounded along the low-gravity inner corridors of Battle School. This smile had weariness in it, and old fears long mastered but still present....

We don’t read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we’re living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.

Guils is the greatest weapon vecause its cuts rarely heal and it aims for the heart

But shouldn’t they still act like children? They aren’t normal. They act like–history. Napoleon and Wellington. Caesar and Brutus.

He splashed into the water, his whole body, not with the reverent attitude of prayer, but with a desperate thirst; he buried his head under the water and drank deep, with his cheek against the...

Religion is tied to the deepest feelings people have. The love that arises from that stewing pot is the sweetest and strongest, but the hate is the hottest, and the anger is the most violent.

I thought speakers didn’t believe in sin,” said a sullen boy.Andrew smiled. “You believe in sin, Styrka, and you do things because of that belief. So sin is real in you, and knowing you, this...

I know I’m a Third, I know it, if you want I’ll go away so you don’t have to be embarrassed in front of everybody, I’m sorry I lost the monitor and now you have...

All dreams. If there was love or pity for him, it was only in his dreams.

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.

It was not right, thought Han Fei-tzu, for his wife to die before him: her ancestor-of-the-heart had outlived her husband. Besides, wives should live longer than husbands. Women were more complete inside themselves. They were...

So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.

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

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

Madness, and then illumination.

Government is all show when it isn’t murder in the dark … or soldiers in the open.

Vanya soon found that America might be an exciting place to arrive, but living there could become, in time, as boring as anything else.

Parents always make their worst mistakes with their oldest children. That’s when parents know the least and care the most, so they’re more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist that they’re...

Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.

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.

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...

As I recall, St. Paul stood by and held the coats of the men who were stoning him (Stephen). Apparently he wasn’t a believer at the time. In fact, I think he was regarded as...

He loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow.

The only teacher that’s worth anything to you is your enemy.

Bean was tired of talking about this. She looked so happy when she talked about God, but he hadn’t figured it out yet, what God even was. It was like, she wanted to give God...

The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life… But they’ve learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong—for we humans do, when the...

I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn— that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong...

But Father has also taught him: Treat a man as if he had a fine reputation to protect, and he will usually endeavor to deserve it.

The only way to retrieve a secret,once known, is to replace it with a lie.

Perhaps a physicist would know at once why this whole idea was absurd. But then, perhaps a physicist would be so locked into the consensus of his scientific community that it would be harder for...

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

He was cold and tired, but he ignored the cold. Around him stars shone. Some bright, some dim, the most constant things in life. Segundo smiled up at them, happy at least to be dying...

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

Death is not a tragedy to the one who dies; to have wasted the life before that death, that is the tragedy.

Ender nodded. It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn’t hurt a bit. But since adults always said it when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate...

In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.’What is it then?’It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The...

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. And, since a great many writers and critics...

Does it help if we’re so strong-willed, stubborn, ambitious, and selfish that we always overcome everything in our way no matter what?” asked Wang-mu.”I think those are the pertinent virtues, yes,” said Peter.”Then let’s do...

If one has to say, in an argument, “I am intelligent! I do know things!” then one might as well stop arguing.

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