Quote #1074

(Regarding humans.) They never know anything. They don't have enough years in their little lives to come to an understanding of anything at all. And yet they think they understand. From earliest childhood, they delude themselves into thinking they comprehend the world, while all that's really going on is that they've got some primitive assumptions and prejudices. As they get older they learn a more elevated vocabulary in which to express their mindless pseudo-knowledge and bully other people into accepting their prejudices as if they were truth, but it all amounts to the same thing. Individually, human beings are all dolts.

More from Orson Scott Card

  1. Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life. -Children of the Mind
  2. Your trust in rationality makes you irrational. (Children of the Mind)
  3. If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.
  4. And it came into Hooch's mind that when both parties are lying and they both know the other party's lying, it comes powerful close to being…
  5. Her action ... meant one thing to him and something quite different to her; it was so different that it was not even the same event.
  6. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth. -Ender's Game
  7. I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it. -Ender's Game
  8. And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves? -Ender's Shadow

All Orson Scott Card quotes