51 Orson Scott Card Quotes on Morality

Orson Scott Card quotes on morality

55. Ender mentally added him to his private list of people who also qualified as human beings.

61. 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.

69. A great rabbi stands teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultry, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. (There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine, a Speaker for the Dead, has told me of two other rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you.) The rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him, the mob forbears, and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. 'Is there anyone here,' he says to them, 'who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?' They murmer and say, 'We all know the desire. But, Rabbi, none of us has acted on it.' The rabbi says, 'Then kneel down and give thanks that God made you strong.' He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, 'Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he'll know I'm his loyal servant.' So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder. Another rabbi, another city. He goes to her and stops the mob, as in the other story, and says, 'Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.' The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. Someday, they think, I may be like this woman, and I'll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated. As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman's head, and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brains onto the cobblestones. 'Nor am I without sin,' he says to the people. 'But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it.' So the women died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance. The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far, they die. Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him.

90. They are too cruel a god for me to worship anymore

97. Don't ever try to teach me about good and evil. I've been there; you've seen nothing but the map

106. 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?

134. It told us that death means something completely different to them. If you really believed that someone was perfect in heart... So righteous that to live another day could only cause them to be less perfect, then wouldn't it be a good thing for them if they were killed and taken directly into heaven?

142. He had the decency to be appalled by his own brutality.

146. 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.

166. How do they manage it, these humans - beginning each time so innocently, yet always sending up with the most blood on their hands?

202. It's the worst thing you'll ever do in your life, helping the people you love to something that in your heart you know is deeply wrong.

258. An eye for an eye? How Christian of you Unbelievers always want other people to act like Christians

298. Trying to shock nuns is not much sport. There is no trophy.

306. My hands are clean, but not because I wasn't prepared to bloody them.

327. I will not be tamed, only persuaded. I will not be coerced or led blindly or tricked or bullied - I am willing only to be convinced. If you don't trust your own basic goodness enough to tell me what you're trying to do... Then you're confessing your own moral weakness and I'll never serve you.

331. It all spoke of the willingness of people to hurt each other, the burning passion to control what other people thought and did. So many people, in secret, subtle ways, acted to destroy people - and not just their enemies, either, but also their friends. Destroying them for the pleasure of knowing that they had the power to cause pain. And so few who devoted their lived to building other peoples strength and confidence. So few who were true teachers, genuine mates.

350. 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.

360. How do you know you're right and were wrong? I don't know

366. The others are even more likely to obey their god Which is? It dangles between their legs

368. Odd isn't it, that physically plain people are perfectly able to see physical beauty in others, while people who are morally maimed are blind to goodness and decency. They honestly think it doesn't exist Oh they know it exists all right. They just never know which people have it.

415. He realized now he simply hated them, even when by chance they were silent. He hated the way they treated women. He hated the way they treated men. He hated the way they thought. He hated the way they didn't think. It was hard to imagine which of them he hated more.

424. 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.

463. 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?

464. 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?

473. I know how it feels to have driven all compassion out of my heart and laugh at the pain of someone else

486. Which is the greater wrong? To hurt the unforgiving one, or hurt the one who has forgiven all?

501. So if the evil he had done wasn't the death of the roaches, what was it? The power he had? His knack for making things go just where he wanted, making them break just in the right place, understanding how things ought to be and helping them get that way?

505. A man always assumes that others are as virtuous as himself

508. Sunday morning, he decided, is designed to let sinners have a sample of the first day of eternity in hell

515. The funny thing was, you see, that Mike Fink didn't think of himself as a murderer. He thought of life as a contest, and dying was what happened to those who came out second best, but it wasn't the same as murder, it was a fair fight

537. 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

572. Gloating is a great joy, isn't it? To have your enemy in your power - there's nothing sweeter is there?

665. Don't it ever occur to you that only good people are afraid of paying for their sins?' No ma'am. I've known some bad people and some good people in my life, and it's the bad ones who live in fear, all the time. Cause they know their own hearts.. And they think everyone else is just waiting to pull the same moves on them that they've got planned to pull on somebody else

680. It was a terrible thing to know about himself, that he could feel such lust to punish a submissive enemy

685. What I'm telling you is, there's some people who do things so bad it tears the fabric of the world, and then there's some people so sweet and good that they can feel it when the world gets torn. They see things, they know things, only they're so good and pure that they don't understand what it is that they're seeing

755. The world will probably be destroyed again, unless we repent. And don't think you can hide from the angels. They start out as ordinary people, and you never know which ones. Suddenly god put the power of destruction in their hands, and they destroy. And just as suddenly, when all the destruction is done, the angels leaves them, and they're ordinary people

770. What I hypocrite I am. To pretend that my motives are pure

782. Tagiri fears the moral ambiguity in something that she knows she must do. She cannot live with not doing it, and yet fears she cannot live with doing it, either. So conceals it from herself in order to proceed with what she must do

794. It's a brave man who beats a little child. They'll no doubt write songs about your courage.

796. Good people do not let others suffer needlessly

867. It made me wonder if perhaps our ancestors' crimes were not in fact far more terrible than they claimed. After all, the only histories we possessed told their version of what happened, and in their accounts they were completely innocent. But aren't all monstrous criminals innocent in their own eyes? Don't all their victims somehow deserve to die, in their imagination at least?

883. He deserved to die except that nothing deserves death

908. How would we be different from them, killing those whose actions we don't like? I don't know! Maybe there's a measuring rod somewhere in the universe where men's' acts are judged, and those who kill other men for the sake of power will be judged more harshly than those who kill those power-hungry men for the sake of freedom. But if there's no place in the universe for a man to resist the thieves of freedom and still be called a good man, then I don't think there is any good or evil in the universe, and it all means nothing and it wouldn't make any difference, there comes a time when you have to take lives in order to - listen to me - in order to -

999. Justice hates it when I make people obey me out of fear. She thinks it's ugly and not nice. She always used to make people obey her by changing what they wanted, so it didn't occur to them to disobey. I think that's degrading and turns people into animals

1006. Doon is the devil, isn't he? Was. He's dead now. At least, he promised me that he'd die But was he? The devil? Satan. The adversary. The enemy of the plan of god. The undoer. The destroyer. Yes. He definitely was. But he meant well

1029. Hypocrites, I said to them. You dare to rob mankind of all it's pain, yet treasure your own agonies. Who watches you?

1046. There are worse reasons to die...than to die because you cannot bear to kill. (Speaker for the Dead)

1057. 'If human beings are all monsters, why should I sacrifice anything for them?'

1068. 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.

1077. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth. -Ender's Game

1082. It is the downfall of evil, that it never sees far enough ahead. -Stone Tables