Orson Scott Card Quotes on Human nature
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Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to be controlled by good people, by people who love you.
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Individual human beings are all tools, that the others use to help us all survive.
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Human beings didn't evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing is the first thing we learned. And a good thing we did, or we'd be dead, and the tigers would rule the earth.
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I fear that I also underestimate the stupidity of the rest of mankind.
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Miro expected him to be wise. He had not expected him to be so intrusive, so dangerous. Yes, he was wise, all right, he kept seeing past pretense, kept saying or doing outrageous things that were, when you thought about it, exactly right. It was as if he was so familiar with the human mind that he could see, right on your face, the desires so deep, the truths so well-disguised that you didn't even know yourself that you had them in you
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Why are they so stupid? Not to know the truth when they hear it? This is how humans are: we question all our beliefs, except the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question.
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She believed that people revealed themselves most when they were vaguely anxious, and few things brought out nonspecific anxieties like being in the presence of a person who never speaks.
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No matter how well you know what a person has done and what he thought of what he was doing when he did it and what he now thinks of what he did, it is impossible to be certain of what he will do next.
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How do they manage it, these humans - beginning each time so innocently, yet always sending up with the most blood on their hands?
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He laughs, you cry... What strange animals we are.
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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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You are only human. I mean it. The price of having these emotions, these passions, is that you have to control them, you have to bear them when they're too strong to bear. You're only human now. You'll never make these feelings go away. You just have to learn not to act on them.
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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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Sister Carlotta is a nun. You'll never find a more honest person Honest people have been known to deceive themselves
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He hadn't realized how much he needed the honor of others until he finally got it
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He pretended all this time that humans were rational human beings, when we are really the most terrible monsters these poor aliens could ever have conceived of in their nightmares.
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For we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane. He pretended all this time that humans were rational beings, when we are really the most terrible monsters these poor creatures could ever have conceived of in their nightmares. They had no way of knowing the story of blind Samson, who pulled down the temple on his own head to slay his enemies.
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[He] didn't know what to say. He didn't even know the name for what he was feeling. 'I think that I don't know you.' she looked at him, a little perplexed. 'No that's wrong. I think that I didn't know you before, even though I thought I knew you, and know that I finally know you, I don't really know you at all.'
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You know nothing about me at all. Which is almost certainly true. I know nothing about you. No one knows anything about you.
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Are men's lives nothing but the secretions of overactive glands?
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The others are even more likely to obey their god Which is? It dangles between their legs
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You're so certain that you can hold people to their commitments. No ones ever made them do that before. Can you now?
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You don't understand everything, but you still make decisions. Well, we don't understand everything, either. But we decided didn't we? And we made the right choice, didn't we?
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Wishful thinking gives false gods to people who hunger for gods, but those who yearn for a world with no gods are no less likely to fall victim to their own wishful thinking
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[They] aren't humans When it comes to hate and rage and envy, yes they are And love and generosity, too. And trust and wisdom and dignity and - Yes, they're humans in all those ways
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[He] always wondered at that smile even as it triumphed over his own anger or envy. Where could such a power over others come from?
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A man always assumes that others are as virtuous as himself
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We've seen the worst that men can do, pa, and been the worst that men can be. But that don't mean that someday we wont see the best, too. And if we can never be perfect after this, well, we can still be pretty good, can't we?
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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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Gloating is a great joy, isn't it? To have your enemy in your power - there's nothing sweeter is there?
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Even the most 'Rational' people - the ones who claimed not to have a religion - were just as chauvinistic about their irreligion, sneering at and ostracizing the believers just the way the believers treated nonmembers of their own groups. It's a human universal
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No one had known him. No one knows me. No one knows who I am or what I can do.
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I think if you left grownups to do what the really actually wanted most in the world to do, every single one of them would lie down and take a nap for the rest of their life. I know this because that's what every grownup does as soon as they're alone
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What does she think we are, idiots? Well, yes, actually. Brilliant, but idiots. It's not as if she didn't have plenty of evidence of absentmindedness from everyone of them.
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Cristoforo smiled, held out his arms, and embraced the lying bastard
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Love is random; fear is inevitable.
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Don't try it with me. I can't be fooled Only a fool can't be fooled. You pretend not to like Mikal. But of all the people here, you're the one most like him
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Contempt is so easy
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A strange people, at once cruel and kind, strong and weak, and so quick to change from one extreme to the other that I could not predict what they would do.
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She had that irony in her eyes. Knowledge without wisdom. Power without purpose. Like me.
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Sometimes people aren't what they seem I know that... No you don't... Because you are exactly what you seem, and so you always assume that other people are, too
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The great forces of history were real, after a fashion. But when you examined them closely, those great forces always came down to the dreams and hungers and judgments of individuals. The choices they made were real. They mattered. Atlantis
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'Because they are beautiful monsters..., And when they live in a network of peace and hope, when they trust the world and their deepest hungers are fulfilled, then within that system, that delicate web, there is joy. That is what we live for, to bind the monsters together, to murder their fear and give birth to their beauty.'' (Wyrms)