Life & Wisdom Quote by Orson Scott Card

Card’s line pretends to be a denial of science fiction’s favorite toy, then quietly smuggles in its real obsession: the trouble we have treating anyone as fully human when they’re not like us. “I don’t believe that there are aliens” is a baited hook. You expect a hard claim about outer space. Instead he pivots to a more uncomfortable planet: Earth, where the word “alien” is less astronomy than social sorting. The wit is in the substitution. He keeps the estrangement but removes the convenient distance.

“I believe there are really different people” has a double edge. It’s generous on its face - difference is real, worth acknowledging - but it also warns against the lazy liberal move of declaring everyone basically the same. Card’s best-known work (Ender’s Game and the sequels) is built on that tension: empathy as a tactical necessity, not a sentimental virtue, and misunderstanding as something that can get bodies stacked. His characters keep learning that the “other” isn’t a costume you can take off once you’ve won the argument.

The subtext is that “alien” is often an alibi. If the other side is literally inhuman, then violence, domination, or dismissal starts to feel like hygiene. By swapping aliens for “different people,” Card forces the reader to sit with a harsher moral arithmetic: the things we justify toward the imagined extraterrestrial are the things we regularly justify toward neighbors, immigrants, political enemies, even family. The line works because it collapses genre distance into social reality, turning sci-fi’s metaphor back into a mirror.