Orson Scott Card on Mind

"He hated the way they thought. He hated the way they didn't think. It was hard to imagine which of them he hated more."

"Good people can't out-think evil, 'cause evil think of things good folks can't think of. Can't enter your head what evil do."

"This is serious, and you gotta keep your mind open in case an idea comes along—you want there to be some room for it to fit in."

"Whenever I hear you saying, rise and shine, rise and shine, it makes me think how lucky dead people are!"

"How could you disguise your own thoughts so even you didn't know what you were thinking?"

"She thinks she's kept me. She would have kept me better if she had let me go now."

"She sounded how you'd expect talking to a tree to sound - bored out of her mind."

"Before the story he refused to even think about it; after the story, it became conceivable to him, and, once he could conceive of it, it soon became inevitable."

"Wishful thinking gives false gods to people who hunger for gods, but those who yearn for a world with no gods are no less likely to fall victim to their own wishful thinking."

"“Don’t you think it’s ironic that you have no idea what you’re supposed to do,” said Verily, “and yet so many people have gone to so much trouble to prevent you from doing it?"

"It’s plain that if I married you for brains I was plumb cheated."

"The funny thing was, you see, that Mike Fink didn't think of himself as a murderer. He thought of life as a contest, and dying was what happened to those who came out second best, but it wasn't the same as murder, it was a fair fight."

"That's what survival means, for me. I thought it was a matter of staying alive, but it isn't. Nobody lives forever anyway. It's how you're remembered. It's what your children thought of you, what they think of you after you're dead. That's survival."

"Why is doubt the one thing we're never skeptical of? We question other peoples' beliefs, and the more sure they are the more we doubt them. But it never occurs to us to doubt our own doubt. Question our own questions. We think our questions are answers."

"I think that a good person can sometimes do wrong out of ignorance or weakness or wrong thinking, but when hard times come, the goodness wins out after all. And a bad person can often seem good and trustworthy for a long time, but when hard times come, the evil in him gets revealed."

"That reminded John Paul of what Andrew had said when he was teaching him to play chess. “You have to think ahead, the next move, the next move, the next move, to see where it’s all going to lead.” John Paul understood the principle as soon as Andrew explained it. But he stopped playing chess anyway, because he didn’t care what happened to little plastic figures on a board of sixty-four squares."