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What was she thinking, to treat evil as if it were a mere mechanical product of deprivation? All the children of the street suffered fear and hunger, helplessness and desperation. But they didn’t all become cold-blooded, calculating murderers.
You, however, understand the profound truth that you must reveal your stupidity openly. To hold your stupidity inside you is to embrace it, to cling to it, to protect it. But when you expose your stupidity, you give yourself the chance to have it caught, corrected, and replaced with wisdom. Be brave, all of you, like Nero Boulanger, and when you have a thought of such surpassing ignorance that you think it’s actually smart, make sure to make some noise, to let your mental limitations squeak out some whimpering
Intelligence and education, which all these children had, apparently didn’t make any important difference in human nature.
No point in getting emotional about anything. Being emotional didn’t help with survival. What mattered was to learn everything, analyze the situation, choose a course of action, and then move boldly. Know, think, choose, do. There was no place in that list for “feel.”
“Our bodies could live forever, you know. We don’t have to wear out. Our cells are all alive; they can maintain and repair themselves, or be replaced by fresh ones. There are even mechanisms to keep replenishing our bones. Menopause need not stop a woman from bearing children. Our brains need not decay, shedding memories or failing to absorb new ones. But God made us with death inside.”
“You are beginning to sound serious about God.” “God made us with death inside, and also with intelligence. We have our seventy years or so—perhaps ninety, with care
“Only a fool closes the door when the wolf is already inside the barn.”
Sometimes David kills Goliath, and people never forget. But there were a lot of little guys Goliath had already mashed into the ground. Nobody sang songs about those fights, because they knew that was the likely outcome. No, that was the inevitable outcome, except for the miracles.
I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don’t want to go through what you’ve been through to get there.
Poke gave him life. Ender gave it meaning.
for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.
