Ender's Shadow (Shadow, #1)

by Orson Scott Card

these fools always look up for power. People above you, they never want to share power with you. Why you look to them? They give you nothing. People below you, you give them hope, you give them respect, they give you power, cause they don’t think they have any, so they don’t mind giving it up.

in her judgment, at least, God did not want his servants to sit around waiting for God to work miracles to save them. He wanted his servants to labor as best they could to bring about righteousness.

It was pride. It was Cain, who thought that being shamed was reason enough to take his brother’s life. It was Judas, who did not shrink to kiss before killing. 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.

She looked so happy when she talked about God, but he hadn’t figured it out yet, what God even was. It was like, she wanted to give God credit for every good thing, but when it was bad, then she either didn’t mention God or had

The criminal misuse of time was pointing out the mistakes. Catching them—noticing them—that was essential. 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.

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.

I’m not stupid!” In Bean’s experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy.

“Surely you’re not saying that God had to choose between long life and intelligence for human beings!” “It’s there in your own Bible, Carlotta. Two trees—knowledge and life. You eat of the tree of knowledge, and you will surely die. You eat of the tree of life, and you remain a child in the garden forever, undying.”

Wiggin really does not care as much about himself as he does about these other kids who aren’t worth five minutes of his time. And yet this may be the very trait that makes everyone focus on him. Maybe this is why in all those stories Sister Carlotta told him, Jesus always had a crowd around him.

The result was that you ended up with a command structure that was top-heavy with guys who looked good in uniform and talked right and did well enough not to embarrass themselves, while the really good ones quietly did all the serious work and bailed out their superiors and got blamed for errors they had advised against until they eventually got out. That was the military.

“When you worship Moloch, Dr. Volescu, you get no answers but the ones your chosen god provides.”

“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.” “So God uses wicked people as his tools.” “God gives us the freedom to do great evil, if we choose. Then he uses his own freedom to create goodness out of that evil, for that is what he chooses.” “So in the long run, God always wins.” “Yes.” “In the short run, though, it can be uncomfortable.”

“In my view, suicide is not really the wish for life to end.” “What is it, then?” “It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide.” “As Adam and Eve hid from the Lord.” “Because they were naked.” “If only such sad people could remember: Everyone is naked. Everyone wants to hide. But life is still sweet. Let it go on.”

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.

errors as because of the winner’s brilliance in battle. The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life. We don’t throw our forces away because every soldier is the queen of a one-member hive. But they’ve learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly 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.