Orson Scott Card Quotes on Psychology
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Sitting there in paranoid fantasy You can't read minds You always get morose and speculate about the destruction of the universe whenever you come out of starflight. It's your peculiar manifestation of motion sickness.
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I desire [belief] enough to act as if I believed, maybe that's what faith is. Or deliberate insanity.
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She did not understand all of human nature, but [he] had taught her this: to stop a human being from doing something, you must find a way to make this person stop wanting to do it.
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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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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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Nobody's rational. We all act because we're sure of what we want, and we believe that the actions we perform will get us what we want, but we never know anything for sure, and so all our rationalities are invented to justify what we were going to do anyway before we thought of any reasons.
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Damn, but they've got us brainwashed, haven't they!
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As if the universe were created to serve him, with all the people in it tuned to resonate his desires
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You ready to command a fleet? I don't know. It depends on whether they want to win. Here's the thing, Bean. Soldiers don't like to lose And that is why losing is a much more powerful teacher than winning.
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So I have to fake it. No, I have to disbelieve it. I have to forget it's true. It isn't true. The truth is what they've been telling us
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Doesn't it occur to you that the very fact that you're asking me this question tells me there's something else for me to figure out, and therefore greatly increases the chance that I will figure it out?
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It was as if Graff had read his heart and found the lie that would penetrate most deeply into his soul and told it to him.
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You are so intent that you believe only what you believe that you believe, that you remain utterly blind to what you rely believe without believing that you believe it.
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If there's one thing our group is too small to endure, it's sexual tension
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It isn't a question of what you need. It never is. It's a question of what he needs. He needs to feel superior to you.
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He fears his own murderous heart so much that he won't let himself think of his whole plan openly
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We never know when you will stop. And so we obey you when you're angry and irrational, because we're afraid of you. And if you think about it without letting rage cloud your reason, you'll realize that we have cause to be afraid
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People are what they want to be
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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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Humans feel compassion primarily for those they conceive of as being part of themselves
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After discussions like this, the boys would turn around and talk about how girls weren't reasonable, they were emotional, you couldn't even have an intelligent conversation with them - but it was the boys who fled from the evidence and constantly shifted their arguments to fit what they wanted to believe. And it was [she] who was ruthlessly realistic, refusing to deny her own feelings or the facts that she observed around her. And refusing to deny that she reached her conclusions first, because of her inmost desires, and only afterward constructed the arguments to support them. Only boys were so foolish that they actually believed their arguments were their reasons
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If you don't want to control what I think, why did you raise your voice? Why did you argue with me at all?
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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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[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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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
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When people say perhaps its cause they're lying. Either they don't believe the thing they're saying, or they do believe it only they don't want to admit they do
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I think the secret to [her] skill at lying is that she never tells a lie that she doesn't believe with all her heart, at least for the moment it takes to tell it
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At that point, if I had consciously realized what I was already planning to do, if I had admitted my rage, my feelings of betrayal, then my conditioning would have kicked in and I would have either suppressed those feelings or gone mad
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What I am seeing right now is a man who is so dominated by his mother that he is willing to throw away his marriage in order to protect her from the trauma of growing up and acting like an adult. So please do keep on shielding her from any chance of ever becoming a mature, productive, empathic human being... I knew that was a facet of your life when I married you. But don't you dare to accuse me of being envious of the sickness that you call motherlove.
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She was more fragile than anyone expected. Her outer toughness was a protective device.
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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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Most people, brought much more than this when they traveled. Perhaps because they were insecure, and needed to surround themselves with familiar things, or to feel that they had many choices to make each day when they dressed, so they didn't have to be so frightened or feel so powerless. Obviously that was not Hunahpuh's problem. He apparently never felt fear at all, or perhaps never regarded himself as a stranger. How remarkable it would be to feel at home in any place. I wish I had that gift
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I think you underestimate the ability of some men to bear the truth No you underestimate the ability of some men to believe that when they are told what they want to hear, it must be true
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If I believe it she can kill me with my own fear
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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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Well, I wish I could tell you that Ender is like me, but Ender is very, very smart.
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When you really know somebody, you can't hate them...or maybe it's just that you can't really know them until you stop hating them.
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...But when it comes to human beings, the only type of cause that matters is final cause, the purpose. What a person had in mind. Once you understand what people really want, you can't hate them anymore. You can fear them, but you can't hate them, because you can always find the same desires in your own heart. Speaker for the Dead
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The dark secret of homosexual society -- the one that dares not speak its name -- is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally. (writing for The Ornery American)
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Oddly enough, even as I am attacked by some as a homophobe, I am attacked by others as being too supportive of homosexuality, simply because I cannot see individual homosexuals, in or out of my books, as anything other than human beings with as complex a combination of good and evil in them as I find within myself. (writing for Nauvoo)
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I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. '(Ender's Game) Spoken by Ender
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You can't defeat a powerful enemy unless you understand him completely, and you can't understand him unless you know the desires of his heart, and you can't know the desires of his heart until you truly love him.