If you’re looking for the best Ender’s Game quotes you’ve come to the right place. We compiled a list of 113 quotes that best summarise the message of Orson Scott Card in Ender’s Game. Let these quotes inspire you!
(And check out our page with Ender’s Game quotes per category if you only want to read quotes from a certain category, such as funny, life, love, politics, and more).
Ender’s Game Quotes
There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn— that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you’re a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale. (Introduction to Ender’s Game)
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Ender began to eat, slowly and carefully, pretending not to notice he was the center of attention.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I would follow such beauty, said something inside Ender. I would see as those eyes see.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Colonel Graff: We won! That’s all that matters.Ender Wiggin: No. The way we win matters.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
It was the waiting and watching that cost the most. For during that time he had to endure.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
You’re bigger than I remember, ” she said stupidly.”You too, ” he said. “I also remember that you were beautiful.””Memory does play tricks on us.””No. Your face is the same, but I don’t remember what beautiful means anymore. Come on. Let’s go out into the lake.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
For the first time in his life, a teacher was pointing out things that Ender had not already seen for himself. For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I’ll become exactly the tool you want me to be, said Ender silently, but at least I wont be fooled into it. I’ll do it because I choose to, not because you tricked me, you sly bastard.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Don’t make fun of me!” Ender said. “I’m afraid I’m going crazy.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
There’s only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that’s being so good at what you do that they can’t ignore you.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
It made Ender listen more carefully to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
The have influence, but no power.””In my experience, influence is power.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
The power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can’t kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Nights were so real that days began to seem dreamlike to him
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
He had so much damn respect he wanted to scream.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
But shouldn’t they still act like children? They aren’t normal. They act like–history. Napoleon and Wellington. Caesar and Brutus.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I didn’t want to hurt him!” Ender cried. “Why didn’t he just leave me alone!
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
A good commander, thought Ender, doesn’t have to make stupid threats.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Let’s fly away and live forever
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
The next day he passed Alai in the corridor, and they greeted each other, touched hands, talked, but they both knew that there was a wall there now.It might be breached, that wall, sometime in the future, but for now the only real conversation between them was the roots that had already grown low and deep, under the wall, where they could not be broken.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Graff had isolated Ender to make him struggle. To make him prove, not that he was competent, but that he was far better than everyone else. That was the only way he could win respect and friendship. It made him a better soldier then he would ever have been otherwise. It also made him lonely, afraid, angry, untrusting. And maybe those traits, too, made him a better soldier.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
In my dreams, ” said Ender, “I’m never sure whether I’m really me.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Soldiers can sometimes make decisions that are smarter than the orders they’ve been given.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you. I didn’t come here because I wanted to be a colonist. I came because I’ve spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it’s too late, before we’re not children anymore.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
All dreams. If there was love or pity for him, it was only in his dreams.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
They must talk to each other directly, Ender, mind to mind. What one thinks, another can also think; what one remembers, another can also re-member. Why would they ever develop language? Why would they ever learn to read and write? How would they know what reading and writing were if they saw them? Or signals? Or numbers? Or anything that we use to communicate? This isn’t just a matter of translating from one language to another. They don’t have a language at all. We used every means we could think of to communicate with them, but they don’t even have the machinery to know we’re signaling. And maybe they’ve been trying to think to us, and they can’t understand why we don’t respond.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Another oral exam, huh?’ Peter said.’Shut up, Peter, ‘ said Valentine.’You should relax and enjoy it, ‘ said Peter. ‘It could be worse.”I don’t know how.”It could be an anal exam.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Being here alone with nothing to do, I’ve been thinking about myself too. Trying to understand why I hate myself so badly.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them…. I destroy them.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I taught you everything you know. But I didn’t teach you everything I know.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
That’s why he hates you, because you didn’t suffer when he tried to punish you.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Everything we do means something.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Do not be disingenuous with me, Colonel Graff. Americans are quite apt at playing stupid when they choose to, but I am not to be deceived.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me—to find out what you’re good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I didn’t want to kill them all. I didn’t want to kill anybody! I’m not a killer! You didn’t want me, you bastards, you wanted Peter, but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other’s dreams.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I will remember this, thought Ender, when I am defeated. To keep dignity, and give honor where it’s due, so that defeat is not disgrace. And I hope I don’t have to do it often.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
If you try and lose then it isn’t your fault. But if you don’t try and we lose, then it’s all your fault.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I know I’m a Third, I know it, if you want I’ll go away so you don’t have to be embarrassed in front of everybody, I’m sorry I lost the monitor and now you have three kids and no obvious explanation, so inconvenient for you, I’m sorry sorry sorry.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
If only we could have talked to you, the hive-queen said in Ender’s words. But since it could not be, we ask only this: that you remember us, not as enemies, but as a tragic sisters, changed into foul shape by fate or God or evolution. If we had kissed, it would have been the miracle to make us human in each other’s eyes. Instead we killed each other. But still we welcome you now as guestfriends. Come into our home, daughters of Earth; dwell in our tunnels, harvest our fields; what we cannot do, you are now our hands to do for us. Blossom, trees; ripen, fields; be warm for them, suns; be fertile for them, planets: they are our adopted daughters, and they have come home.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
You’re a monster.Thanks. Does this mean I get a raise?No, just a medal. The budget isn’t inexhaustable.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
So the whole war is beause we can’t talk to each other.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
It isn’t the world at stake, Ender. Just us. Just humankind. As far as the rest of the earth is concerned, we could be wiped out and it would adjust, it would get on with the next step in evolution. But humanity doesn’t want to die. As a species, we have evolved to survive.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what “just living” might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
The essence of training is to allow error without consequence.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
He woke up and fought another battle and won. Then he went to bed and slept again and dreamed again and then he woke up and won again and slept again and he hardly noticed when waking became sleeping. Nor did he care.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
There are miracles even reactivity can’t pull off, Ender
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
You made them hate me.” Said Ender”So? What will you do about it? Crawl in a corner? Start kissing their little backsides so they’ll love you again? There’s only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that’s being so good at what you do that they can’t ignore you. I told them you were the best. Now you damn well better be.” -Graff
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I know, you’ve been here a year, you think these people are normal. Well, they’re not. WE’RE not. I look in the library, I call up books on my desk. Old ones, because they won’t let us have anything new, but I’ve got a pretty good idea what children are, and we’re not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares. Children aren’t in armies, they aren’t COMMANDERS, they don’t rule over forty other kids, it’s more than anybody can take and not get crazy.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I have hope for you, if only because you’re the only one left to hope for.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Is it some law of human nature that you inevitably become whatever your first commander was?
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I’ve learned all I’m ever going to learn from you.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Just because they didn’t know they were killing human beings doesn’t mean they weren’t killing human beings.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
We have to go. I’m almost happy here.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along–the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires. And in writing _Ender’s Game_, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective–the perspective in which their feelings and decisions are just as real and important as any adult’s. … _Ender’s Game_ asserts the personhood of children, and those who are used to thinking of children in another way … are going to find _Ender’s Game_ a very unpleasant place to live.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
That’s the problem with winning right from the start, thought Ender. you lose friends.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
It had to be a trick or you couldn’t have done it.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
While you’re governing the colony and I’m writing political philosophy, They’ll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other’s room and play checkers and have pillow fights.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
But my eagerness to sacrifice little children in order to save mankind is wearing thin.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
What else should you be? Human beings didn’t evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing’s the first thing we learned. And a good thing we did, or we’d be dead, and the tigers would own the earth.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I think Bonzo died. I dreamed about it last night. I remembered the way he looked after I jammed his face with my head. I think I must have pushed his nose back into his brain. The blood was coming out of his eyes. I think he was dead right then.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can’t kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and one will ever save you.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Ender didn’t like fighting. He didn’t like Peter’s kind, the strong against the weak, and he didn’t like his own kind either, the smart against the stupid.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
We don’t punish the ones who fail. They just-don’t go on
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Alai saw the tears but had the grace not to say so. “They’re fartheads, Ender, they won’t even let you take anything you own.” Ender grinned and didn’t cry after all. “Think I should strip and go naked?”Alai laughed, too.On impulse Ender hugged him, tight, almost as if he were Valentine. He even thought of Valentine then and wanted to go home. “I don’t want to go, ” he said.Alai hugged him back. “I understand them, Ender. You are the best of us. Maybe they in a hurry to teach you everything.””They don’t want to teach me everything, ” Ender said. “I wanted to learn what it was like to have a friend.”Alai nodded soberly. “Always my friend, always the best of my friends, ” he said. Then he grinned. “Go slice up the buggers.””Yeah, ” Ender smiled back.Alai suddenly kissed Ender on the cheek and whispered in his ear, “Salaam.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Valentine went back to class without answering. That night Demosthenes published a scathing denunciation of the population limitation laws. People should be allowed to have as many children as they like, and the surplus population should be sent to other worlds, to spread mankind so far across the galaxy that no danger, no invasion could ever threaten the human race with annihilation. “The most noble title any child can have, ” Demosthenes wrote, “is Third.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, and then happiness as we can manage it…. Take what pleasure you can in the interstices of your work, but your work is first, learning first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
It didn’t matter he was brilliant and dedicated and good. He was a child. He was young.No he isn’t, thought Ender. Small, yes. Bur Bean has been through a battle with a whole army depending on him and on the soldiers that he led. and he performed splendidly, and the won. There’s no youth in that. No childhood.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Maybe that’s who you are, what you remember.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
From you I can learn things that nobody knows.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
who would expect less?” she said. ” You’re a Wiggin.” ” Whatever that means.” He said. ” It means that you are going to make a difference in the world.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I came because I’ve spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it’s too late, before we’re not children anymore.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be. She thought of that, worried about it for a few days, and then wrote a column using that as a premise, to show that politicians who toadied to the Russians in order to keep the peace would inevitably end up subservient to them in everything.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
[That wall] might be breached sometime in the future, but for now the only real conversation between them was the roots that had already grown low and deep, under the wall, where they could not be broken.The most terrible thing, though, was the fear that the wall could never be breached, that in his heart Alai was glad of the separation, and was ready to be Ender’s enemy. For now that they could not be together, they must be infinitely apart, and what had been sure and unshakable was now fragile and insubstantial; from the moment we are not together, Alai is a stranger, for he has a life now that will be no part of mine, and that means that when I see him we will not know each other.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I’ll go from world to world until I find a time and place where you can come awake in safety. And I’ll tell your story to my people, so that perhaps in time the can forgive you, too. The way that you’ve forgiven me.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
The kid is scary.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I’ve lived too long with pain. I won’t know who I am without it.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Ender had come to feel a unity so strong that the word we came to his lips much more easily than I.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him…
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I need you to be clever, Bean. I need you to think of solutions to problems we haven’t seen yet. I want you to try things that no one has ever tried because they’re absolutely stupid.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
We need you to help us figure out how you can help us.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Panem et Circenses translates into ‘Bread and Circuses.’ The writer was saying that in return for full bellies and entertainment, his people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
There was no doubt now in Ender’s mind. There was no help for him. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no on ewould save him from it. Peter might be scum, but Peter had been right, always right; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can’t kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
The classes were valuable, but the real education was the game.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
In a way she actually preferred Peter to other people because of this. He always acted out of intelligent self-interest.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Home was merely a dull ache in the back of his memory. A tiredness in his eyes.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Ender nodded. It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn’t hurt a bit. But since adults always said it when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Peter, you’re twelve years old. I’m ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I’ve got a pretty good idea what children are, and we’re not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Carn Carby left, and ender mentally added him to his private list of people who also qualified as human beings.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, then happiness as we can manage it.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
They have influence, but no power.” “In my experience, influence is power.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Sometimes lies are more dependable than the truth.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
You don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t pushed. Nobody knows. I did it the way I did it, and it worked. Above all, it worked.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
When it comes down to it, though, the real decision is inevitable: If one of us has to be destroyed, let’s make damn sure we’re the ones alive at the end.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
In my experience, influence is power.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
As the doctor treated the wound, Mazer said, ” I don’t care how much you eat, Ender, self-cannibalism won’t get you out of this school.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
If you can cheat, so can I. I won’t let you beat me unfairly – I’ll beat you unfairly first.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Remember, I’m the only person her who’s paid to be nice to you. But not too nice. Give me any lip and I’ll break your face. OK?
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were the words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
So I don’t even get a chance to learn before I’m being judged.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
I’m hurting you to make you a better soldier in every way. To sharpen your wit. To intensify your effort. To keep you off balance, never sure what’s going to happen next, so you always have to be ready for anything, ready to improvise, determined to win no matter what. I’m also making you miserable.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
That is the earth, he thought. Not a globe thousands of kilometers around, but a forest with a shining lake, a house hidden at the crest of a hill, high in the trees, a grassy slope leading upwards from the water, fish leaping and birds strafing to take the bugs that lived at the border between water and sky. Earth was the constant noise of crickets, and winds, and birds
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish