25 Orson Scott Card Quotes on Survival

Orson Scott Card quotes on survival

17. 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.

19. ...Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me - to find out what you're good for.

20. Individual human beings are all tools, that the others use to help us all survive.

21. There was no doubt in Ender's mind. There was no help for him. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no one would save him from it. Peter might be scum, but Peter had been right, always right; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill you are always subject to those who can, and nothing no one will ever save you.

22. 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.

40. Thank you for this... For dry eyes and silent weeping. You taught me how to hide anything I felt. More than ever, I need that now.

59. I don't care how much you eat, Ender, self-cannibalism won't get you out of this school.

167. We pretend to be whatever we must in order to survive.

201. Us or them.

226. I'm not interested in my own life anymore. Do you understand? The only life I care about in the world is yours. If I lose you, what is there to hold me here?

287. Sometimes the other side is irresistibly strong, and then the only sensible course of action is to retreat in order to save your force to fight another day.

296. Analyzing things was fine, but good reflexes could save your life.

337. Just because you're a fatalist doesn't mean I want to die.

388. Maybe we're like the baboons. When we're stable and civilized, the women decide things, establish the households, the connections between them, create the neighborhoods and the friendships. But when we're nomadic, living lives on the edge of survival, men rule, and brook no interference from the women. Perhaps that's what civilization means - is the dominance of the female over the male/ and wherever that lapses, we call the result uncivilized, barbarian ... Manly.

410. That's what survival means, for me. I thought it was a matter of staying alive, but it isn't. Nobody lives forever anyway. It's how you're remembered. It's what your children thought of you, what they think of you after you're dead. That's survival. And if there's one thing that can truly be said about me, it's this: I survive.

649. I couldn't bear to go out there and ... Be alive. When I had killed her.

701. 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

760. How is it possible that stupidity should end our lives when our enemies' cleverest stratagems had not

778. First we try to preserve ourselves, until we see that we can't. Then we try to preserve our children, until we see we can't. Then we act to preserve our kin, and then our village or tribe, and when we see we can't preserve even them, then we act in order to preserve our memory. And if we can't do that, what is left? We finally have the perspective of trying to act for the good of humanity as a whole Or despairing

835. The river was pure treachery, so smooth on top, the water so cool on a hot day, and yet there was death in it, murder in it's heart. Like the Egyptians. Such a darling child, they would say, and pat her head. And Miriam would answer in her heart : you made my father a slave. You want us all dead. You are the river, you and all of Egypt. You are the river and as long as we stay beside you we are in danger of drowning

857. She wants to die, Aaron. Please try to constrain her so she doesn't take the rest of us with her' I don't want to die! I wasn't to live in freedom, like any of you!

874. We'll die heroically I'd rather live

904. I'm old. I can't cope with all this.' Can you cope with survival? Maybe we'll all survive, after all.

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

1105. Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, then happiness as we can manage it.