All quotes

Son, suppose you tend to your knitting and I tend to mine.

A world is supported by four things. The learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing without a ruler who knows the art of ruling.

Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain you cannot see the mountain.

All men beneath your position covet your position.

Wild beasts of the desert do hunt there, Waiting for the innocents to pass. Oh-h-h, tempt not the gods of the desert, Lest you seek a lonely epitaph.

Humans live best when each has his own place, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things. Destroy the place and destroy the person.

Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is true of humans in the infinite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules sealed in a flask. The human question is not how many…

Give as few orders as possible. Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.

How easy it is to kill the uprooted plant, especially when you put it down in hostile soil.

There are those among my young men who have reached the age of wild spirits. They must be eased through this period. I must leave no great reasons around for them to challenge me. Because I would have to maim and kill among them. This is…

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path…

The mind can go either direction under stress — toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind…

When your opponent fears you, then's the moment when you give the fear its own rein, give it the time to work on him. Let it become terror. The terrified man fights himself. Eventually, he attacks in desperation. That is the most dangerous…

If you rely only on your eyes, your other senses weaken.

The price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving paradise in this life — we went soft, we lost our edge.

And what he saw was a time nexus within this cave, a boiling of possibilities focused here, wherein the most minute action — the wink of an eye, a careless word, a misplaced grain of sand — moved a gigantic lever across the known universe…

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

Control the coinage and the courts — let the rabble have the rest. If you want profits, you must rule. There is truth in those words, but I ask myself who are the rabble and who are the ruled?

Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.

Lem smiled. "I see now why you've lasted so long with my father, Dr. Benyawe. You're not afraid to speak your mind. My father respects that." "No, Lem. I have lasted so long with your father because I am always right."

She slapped her desk with the palm of her hand. Now this was auditing. If only her father could see her now. "Auditing?" He said the word like it left a sour taste in his mouth. "That's worse that accounting, Imala. You're not even…

"Of course it's our decision [whether or not we send a warning message to Earth]," said Toron. "Who else could make it?" "Everyone," said Victor. "This affects everyone. This changes everything. This is an alien starship. We have no right…

"We can't call them hormigas. That's Spanish for 'ant.' The scientific community would never approve of a living language classification. It needs to be the Latin. Formic. At least that's my professional recommendation." Lem blinked. "Who…

But this isn't how it feels to be a bugger, thought Ender. They don't ware this face like a mask, it is their face. On their home worlds, do the buggers put on human masks, and play?

The enemy's door is down.

We train our commanders the way we do because that's what it takes — they have to think in certain ways, they can't be distracted by a lot of things, so we isolate them. You. Keep you separate. And it works. But it's so easy, when you…

Fairness is a wonderful attribute, Major Anderson. It has nothing to do with war.

He toyed with the idea of trying to be like the other boys. But he couldn't think of any jokes, and none of theirs seemed funny. Wherever their laughter came from, Ender couldn't find such a place in himself. He was afraid and fear made…

Human beings are free except when humanity needs them.

He isn't a killer. He just wins — thoroughly.