"Ignorance is not a tragedy," said Anton, "merely an opportunity. But to know and refuse to know what you know, that is foolishness."
Shadow Puppets is a science fiction novel by American author Orson Scott Card, published in 2002. It is the sequel to Shadow of the Hegemon and the third book in the Ender's Shadow series. It was originally to be called Shadow of Death.
"You saved the world. All of humanity is your progeny. And yet... it is empty, isnt it? They didnt take it away from you the way they took my work from me. But time has taken it away. Its in the past, and yet you are still alive, so what is your life for?"
"Im not having children." "Thats the best part," she said. "Ill have them for you." "You know what I meant," said Bean. "Its not done by kissing, so youre safe so far."
"You fight dirty." "I fight like a girl."
"We dont always get the leader that we want," said Graff. "But sometimes we get to choose among the leaders that we have."
"Am I the only one here who sees something of himself in the man whos lying in this box?"
"My friendships were not... transcendent. They were all tied to my work, and when my work went away, so did all my friends. They were not unkind, they still inquired after me, they made overtures, but there was nothing to say, our minds and our hearts did not really touch at any point. I discovered that I did not know anybody, and nobody knew me."
"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."
"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."
"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"
"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"