Ender's Game Quotes

I don’t care if I pass your test, I don’t care if I follow your rules. If you can cheat, so can I. I won’t let you beat me unfairly - I’ll beat you unfairly first.

Your face is the same, but I don’t remember what beautiful means anymore.

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.

So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.

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.

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.

I am your enemy, the first one you’ve ever had who was smarter than you. There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy shows you where you are weak. Only the enemy tells you where he is strong. And the rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you. I am your enemy from now on. From now on I am your teacher.

Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.

Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.

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.

Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.

I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.

I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not “true” because we’re hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.

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.

I’ve lived too long with pain. I won’t know who I am without it.

He could see Bonzo’s anger growing hot. Hot anger was bad. Ender’s anger was cold, and he could use it. Bonzo’s was hot, and so it used him.

Since when do you have to tell the enemy when he has won?

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.

And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.

Remember, the enemy’s gate is down.

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.

Ender Wiggin isn’t a killer. He just wins—thoroughly.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man stupid and blind in the eyes.

We have to go. I’m almost happy here.

There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.