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He knew that a child named Bean was wise not to laugh at other kids’ names.
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.
If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement.
Analyzing things was fine, but good reflexes could save your life.
The world was full of locked doors, and he had to get his hands on every key.
Intelligence and education, which all these children had, apparently didn’t make any important difference in human nature.
Not that Bean didn’t have feelings. He simply refused to think about them or dwell on them or let them influence his decisions, when anything important was at stake.
In Bean’s litany of survival—know, think, choose, do—intelligence only mattered in the first three, and was the decisive factor only in the second one.
I’m not stupid!” In Bean’s experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy.
“Do you know why Satan is so angry all the time? Because whenever he works a particularly clever bit of mischief, God uses it to serve his own righteous purposes.”
the only thing a commander ever truly controls is his own army—training, morale, trust, initiative, command and, to a lesser degree, supply, placement, movement, loyalty, and courage in battle. What the enemy will do and what chance will bring, those defy all planning. The commander must be able to change his plans abruptly when obstacles or opportunities appear. If his army isn’t ready and willing to respond to his will, his cleverness comes to nothing.
Poke gave him life. Ender gave it meaning.
Life is about finding this.
Because here’s the thing—we don’t give a shit about fairness here. We’re soldiers. Soldiers do not give the other guy a sporting chance. Soldiers shoot in the back, lay traps and ambushes, lie to the enemy and outnumber the other bastard every chance they get.
finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life.
wrong—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.
humans will always act to preserve their own lives—except for the times when they don’t.
He pretended all this time that humans were rational beings, when we are really the most terrible monsters these poor aliens could ever have conceived of in their nightmares.
