Orson Scott Card Quotes on Ethics
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It was just him and me. He fought with honor. If it weren't for his honor, he and the others would have beaten me together. They might have killed me, then. His sense of honor saved my life. I didn't fight with honor... I fought to win.
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I went back through some of the tapes. I can't help it. I like the kid. I think we're going to screw him up. Of course we are. It's our job. We're the wicked witch. We promise gingerbread, but we eat the little bastards alive.
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In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don't exist.
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It had to be a trick or you couldn't have done it. It's the bind we were in. We had to have a commander with so much empathy that he would think like [them], understand them and anticipate them. So much compassion that he would win the love of his underlings and work with them like a perfect machine... But somebody with that much compassion could never be the killer we needed. Could never go into battle willing to win at all costs. If you knew, you couldn't do it. If you were the kind of person who would do it even if you knew, you could never have understood [them] well enough.
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Don't ever try to teach me about good and evil. I've been there; you've seen nothing but the map
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You're a fool. If people only react to the way that others treat them, then nobody is responsible for anything. If your sins are not your own to choose, then how can you repent?
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Your dream is a good one. It's the dream of every living creature. The desire that is the very root of life itself: to grow until all the space you can see is part of you, under your control. It's the desire for greatness. There are two ways, though, to fulfill is. One way is to kill anything that is not yourself, to swallow it up or destroy it, until nothing is left to oppose you. But that way is evil. You say to all the universe, only I will be great, and to make room for me the rest of you must give up even what you already have, and become nothing
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There are worse reasons to die, than to die because you cannot bear to kill What about someone who can't kill, and can't die, and can't live, either? Don't deceive yourself. You'll do all three someday
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You've done all this thinking, you've seen all the possibilities for the future - good ones and bad ones alike - and yet the only ones you are willing to believe in, the imagined future that you seize upon as the foundation for all your moral judgments, is the only future in which everyone that you and I have ever loved and everything we'd ever hoped for must be obliterated.
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I no longer tell anyone half of what I know, because if I told the whole truth there would be fear, hatred, brutality, murder, war.
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You'd think she'd learn something from that. But she still does the same thing. Making decisions that deform other people's lives, without consulting them, without ever conceiving that perhaps they don't want her to save them from whatever supposed misery she's saving them from.
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You aren't very good at determining what other people want and need from you... No one is. We're all as likely to hurt as help.
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Even gentle people recognize that sometimes the decision not to kill is a decision to die.
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'Why do people act as if war and murder were unnatural? What's unnatural is to go your whole life without ever raising your hand in violence.' from The God Whispers of Han Qing-jao
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An eye for an eye? How Christian of you Unbelievers always want other people to act like Christians
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There were times for absolute honesty between friends, but this wasn't one of them.
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Nobody was going to wait for you strike. Because here's the thing - we don't give a shit about fairness here. We're soldiers. Soldiers do not give the other guy a sporting chance. Soldiers shoot in the back, lay traps and ambushes, lie to the enemy and outnumber the other bastard every chance they get. Your kind of murder only works among civilians. And you were too cocky, too stupid, too insane to realize that.
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Isn't that what it means to be civilized? That you can wait to get what you want?
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My hands are clean, but not because I wasn't prepared to bloody them.
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Wouldn't it have been better to change humanity so it no longer desired to destroy itself?
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If I had taken away the desire for violence then humanity would not have been humanity. Not that human beings need to be violent in order to be human, but if you ever lose the will to control, the will to destroy, then it must be because you choose to lose it. My role was not to force you to be gentle and kind; it was to keep you alive while you decided for yourselves what kind of people you wanted to be.
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You are truly a monster. You speak of sacrilege and massacre of innocents, and then you ask me to trust you. I speak of necessity, and ask you to help me keep from being a monster.
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How do you know you're right and were wrong? I don't know
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Love and respect have nothing to do with controlling what other people do
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Smart, but not smart-mouthed; obedient, but willing to take the initiative; courageous, but not foolish; confident, but not boastful.
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You'd think, from the way you talk, that people were responsible for their own behavior And they're not? Haven't you ever seen a 3 year old when he makes a foolish blunder? He looks at whatever child or adult is nearby and screams at him 'look at what you made me do!' that's the moral universe that [they] always lived in
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Sometimes those who care for the whole community must act in a way that harms the individual. For a good man it never becomes easy and he avoids it when he can; but when people need him to be harsh, he will be harsh indeed, and he won't shrink from it, he'll do it with his own hand and let it be known what he does.
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He would know what was right. Yet with his marvelous gift of knowing right from wrong, why couldn't he realize that his yearning to be something other than himself was hopelessly wrong, was wasting his life and poisoning his heart?
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Does a son betray his father? If a father commands a son to commit a crime so terrible that the son can't do it and live with himself, then is it betrayal for the son to disobey his father?
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Children are nothing but tools of their parents
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Law can change how people behave when others are watching - that's all
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Which is the greater wrong? To hurt the unforgiving one, or hurt the one who has forgiven all?
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A man always assumes that others are as virtuous as himself
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To my way of thinking, a duel is just two murderers who agree to take turns trying to kill each other
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Alvin wondered if it was true - if all men had evil in their hearts, and those men as were good, maybe they were simply the ones who controlled theirselves so well they could act contrary to their heart's desire. But if that were so, then no man was good, not one
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[She] learned that justice could be cruel, and crueler yet necessity, but mercy was the cruelest thing of all. That would be useful to her
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You took sides!' So did you. The difference is that I sided with a man who was asking nothing more than to live with dignity... And you were siding with a woman who was using her connection with me as a way of raising herself above other people, which is foolish and self-destructive and I kept waiting for you to say something, for you to do anything to get [her] under control and you never did, not even when [he] was walking out on her because he couldn't take her psychotic hunger for control any longer
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I'm not the kind of woman that has affairs' That is such pure, high-minded sounding bullshit, my love, my darling, thou object of my erotic imaginations. You are precisely the kind of woman who has affairs - you are miserable with your unloving, disloyal, self-serving, manipulative son-of-a-bitch of a husband, and you are in love with a caring, sensitive... Guy
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When we intended to enjoy being cruel, we must transform our victim into either a beast or a god
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Wreaking blood and carnage in the normal European Christian manner?
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I don't like making people do things against their will No, sees-in-the-dark. You just refuse to leave them alone until they change their minds. Of their own free will
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Good people do not let others suffer needlessly
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My aim is not to corrupt the weak, but to exalt the strong
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How dare they suppress the truth, I thought. But in the months since then I have come to understand that there are different kinds of truth
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A true leader finds out what will be good for his people and then shapes laws that will help achieve that good purpose. If the people don't understand what he's doing, he persuades them if he can. If they refuse to be persuaded, then he acts for their good anyway. And if doing this costs him power, then he would rather lose his power for doing right, than keep his power by doing wrong. Because he loves his people more than he loves his office
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Unfree as the world was. They didn't really know it, and they were at peace. Who was I to think that this peace was worse than war?
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Everybody dies. What matters is what you do between now and when it happens to you. It was especially important for [him], because he was living for two
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Absolute power corrupts absolutely
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It's no challenge to destroy the weak
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There are worse reasons to die...than to die because you cannot bear to kill. (Speaker for the Dead)
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Good people can't out-think evil, cause evil thinks of things good folks can't think of. -Homebody
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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.
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[They] have a higher allegiance to their own conscience than to the rules others set down for them. It's a failing, if your object is to maintain order, but if your goal is to learn and adapt, it's a virtue.