Xenocide (Ender's Saga #3)

by Orson Scott Card

“Still not dead,” she said. She had greeted him with these words each time she woke during the past few days. At first the words had seemed whimsical or ironic to him, but now he knew that she spoke with disappointment. She longed for death now, not because she hadn’t loved life, but because death was now unavoidable, and what cannot be shunned must be embraced. That was the Path.

It was her way of asking him to share his private thoughts with her. When others asked his private thoughts, he felt spied upon. But Jiang-qing asked only so that she could also think the same thought; it was part of their having become a single soul.

You spoke a moment ago as if you believed that human beings had actually achieved intelligence.> <Clearly they have.> <I think not. I think they have found a way to fake intelligence.

<They think they’re rational through all those stages.> <Self-delusion. Even at their best, they never, as individuals, rise above the level of manual laborers. Who among them has the time to become intelligent?> <Not one.>

From earliest childhood, they delude themselves into thinking they comprehend the world, while all that’s really going on is that they’ve got some primitive assumptions and prejudices.

<So you’re saying that no one is ever individually intelligent, and groups are even stupider than individual—and yet by keeping so many fools engaged in pretending to be intelligent, they still come up with some of the same results that an intelligent species would come up with.> <Exactly.>

The chairs were designed to make you so physically uncomfortable that you longed for a less corporeal existence. Punish the flesh so you’ll prefer to live in the spirit.

“There are many long-term problems,” he said, “but we won’t have much chance to solve those if we don’t solve the immediate one.

As a martyr, he’ll have a lot more people wanting to avenge him than he ever had disciples wanting to follow him during his life.”

A nightstick is an invitation to argue with authority, because you can always run away. A pistol is an incentive to behave politely.”

I blame you for that, and if you don’t hold yourself responsible for all the consequences of your own acts, then you are truly unworthy of human society and I hope you lose your freedom forever.”

“You have always been useless. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t necessary.”

“Happiness can depend as easily on useless things as on useful ones.”

over—we must do all we can do without destroying our ability to keep doing it.”

That’s what daughters are for. To go where we will never go, to carry our memory on to places that we’ll never see.

places in time.