Just because they didn’t know they were killing human beings doesn’t mean they weren’t killing human beings.
And what? What’s the other choice? To passively let things happen and then say: “Tut-tut, what at botch that was”? Don’t we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don’t we try to frame it so they’ll chose as we think they should?
There was some enthusiasm for a Caliban village, but it quickly dissipated when people contemplated a future village school and what the mascot might look like.
Knocking him down won the first fight. I wanted to win all the next ones, too. So they’d leave me alone.
A non-materialist. And yet you are unpleasantly fat. A gluttonous ascetic? Such a contradiction.
He woke up and fought another battle and won. Then he went to bed and slept again and dreamed again and then he woke up and won again and slept again and he hardly noticed when waking became sleeping. Nor did he care.
The bones are hard and by themselves seem dead and stony, but by rooting into and pulling against the skeleton, the rest of the body carries out all the motions of life.
Remember, I’m the only person her who’s paid to be nice to you. But not too nice. Give me any lip and I’ll break your face. OK?
Alvin smiled back, and kissed her. “People talk about fools counting chickens before they hatch. That’s nothing. We name them.
You have to think ahead, the next move, the next move, the next move, to see where it’s all going to lead.
We live in a time when moderates are treated worse than extremists, being punished as if they were more fanatical than the actual fanatics.
What good were the rules of time when the rules of magic contradicted them.
The piggies were not to be disturbed-.
Child-rearing today was so complicated. You always had to think of what they’d say on television later.
Before we are citizens, he thought, we are children, and it is as children that we come to understand freedom and authority, liberty and duty. I have done my duty. I have bowed to authority. Mostly. And now, like Russia, I can set aside those burdens for a little while and see what happens.
You don’t have to eat the entire turd to know that it’s not a crab cake.
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.
Characters, as most writers understand, are truly developed through their relationships with others.
As the doctor treated the wound, Mazer said, ” I don’t care how much you eat, Ender, self-cannibalism won’t get you out of this school.
Ender had come to feel a unity so strong that the word “we” came to his lips much more easily than “I.