Quing-Jao: I am a slave to the gods, and I rejoice in it. Jane: A slave who rejoices is a slave indeed.
Two sides of the same coin, but which side is which?
Isn’t it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality.
Nature can’t evolve a species that hasn’t the will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never cease to exist.
He would always speak the language of the heart with an awkward foreign accent.
If the other fellow can’t tell you his story, you can never be sure he isn’t trying to kill you.
This is what historians usually do, quibble about cause and effect when the point is, there are times when the world is in flux and the right voice in the right place can move the world. Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, for instance. Bismark. Lenin.
The most noble title any child can have, Demosthenes wrote, is third.
I have to win this now, and for all time, or I’ll fight it every day and it will get worse and worse.
With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were the words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.
Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender.
So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.
But Father has also taught him: Treat a man as if he had a fine reputation to protect, and he will usually endeavor to deserve it.
He is dangerous, he is beautiful, I could drown in his understanding.
I don’t hate you, I love you, you’re part of myself, you’re my heart and when you go it’s my heart torn out and carried away –.
I stole their future from them; I can only being to repay by seeing what I can learn from their past.
In a way she actually preferred Peter to other people because of this. He always acted out of intelligent self-interest.
I have hope for you, if only because you’re the only one left to hope for.
When you walk on the face of a world, then forgiveness comes.
I carry the seeds of death within me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love.