"Why do you bother asking, when you know the answer and you also know that you don't intend to believe it?"

Orson Scott Card Literature See all quotes by Orson Scott Card →

React to this quote

More by Orson Scott Card

“We can wash people in the water all we want, but we can never wash their parents out of their hearts.”

“How is clean, painless nonexistence any worse than clean, painless death?”

“We've seen the worst that men can do, pa, and been the worst that men can be. But that don't mean that someday we won't see the best, too. And if we can never be perfect after this, well, we can still be pretty good, can't we?”

“Last night Alvin just got mad, which she said would only guarantee that he’d stay stupid.”

“Once you have the gallows, you’ll find new reasons to hang people from it.”

“It is the essence of dignity to pretend to desire what you cannot prevent.”

Resonant Thoughts

"I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did. The being described in …"

— Thomas Jefferson

Politics

#knowledge

"The Universe is one vast chemical laboratory, in constant operation, by her internal forces. The laws or principles of attraction, cohesion, and repulsion, produce in never-ending succession the phen…"

— Ernestine Rose

Social Activism1810–1892

#knowledge

"You may produce a case here and there of abuse of the dole: you may produce an occasional man who marches with the unemployed and has a bad record; but every Member of this House who has been in a con…"

— Clement Attlee

Politics1883–1967

#knowledge

"From the knowledge of that fatal necessity that reduces man to dust we pass to a contemptuous contemplation of the nothingness that is life itself. The fear before the absolute limit of death becomes …"

— Michel Foucault

Literature1926–1984

#knowledge