Visitors Quotes

“No system works well unless good people do their jobs with integrity, and then almost any system works well enough.”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors

“What an unfriendly country,” said Noxon. “Different time, different place,” said Wheaton. “We think we’re a very welcoming country. Generous and kind. Unless we don’t like your language or the way you look.”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors

“All education is self-education,” said Noxon. “And all self-education builds on the foundation provided by your teachers.”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors

“I’ve had enough adventures,” said Noxon, “to know that boredom is the closest thing to happiness. Boredom means that there’s nothing wrong. You’re not hungry, you’re not in pain. Nobody’s making any demands on you. Your mind is free to think whatever you want. The only thing that makes boredom unpleasant is if you’re impatient for something else to happen.”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors

“Besides,” said Rigg-the-killer, “I don’t want to leave the future of the human race on both planets in the tiny little hands of the sentient mice of Odinfold.”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors

“Oh,” said Wheaton. “Oh, I see. Yes, that does bring mathematics into it.”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors

“It's better to lose someone you love...than to have no one to lose.”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors

“The whole world always burns...Or it floods. Or some insect eats the crops and you starve...Every baby you have dies eventually, no matter what you do. Yet we have babies and try to go on.”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors

“All history is the same thing over and over...The technology may change, but the behavior is still human. We are who we are. Individuals learn, grow up, get better, wiser, stronger, healthier, kinder—or the opposite. As a group, though, we keep inventing the same behaviors. Some work, some don't.”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors

“Now she understood that someone had to end the council by declaring specifically what had been decided and what must happen next. Without absolute clarity, people would go off and dither, especially if they had doubts about the decision.”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors

“That’s how we’re going to face the end of the world? Reading a book?”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors

“Shy people might take their doses of companionship like an ill-tasting medicine, but they need it, and they suffer a thousand maladies, physical and mental, if they don’t have it.”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors

“Because Garden cannot survive one-nineteenth slave and eighteen-nineteenths free. A house divided against itself cannot stand!”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors

“If you can own property, how are you a slave?” asked Rigg. “Because your owner can move you to one place or another, can break up your marriage, can sell your children to some other owner, can decide how much education you’ll receive, and what work you’ll do, and what hours you’ll keep.”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors

“But it could wait until they got back. That was the nice thing about the past—it stayed right where you put it until you needed to pick it up again.”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors

“Lack of truthfulness doesn’t weaken a story if you can get enough people to believe the lie.”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors

“Nobody knows more than can be learned in a single lifetime,”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors

“Stubborn’ just means you don’t want to do something somebody else wants you to do, and ‘annoying’ just means somebody else is frustrated that you won’t obey them.”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors

“There are too many players in this game,” said Ram Odin.”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors

“Don’t ever ask questions that can only be answered one way, no matter what the truthful answer might be.”
― Orson Scott Card, Visitors