"You who speak languages, you are such liars"
About this Quote
A jab like this only lands because it weaponizes a compliment. “You who speak languages” sounds like praise for cosmopolitan skill, the kind of badge modern culture hands out as proof of empathy and intelligence. Then Card snaps the trap shut: “you are such liars.” The whiplash is the point. He’s not arguing that multilingual people are uniquely dishonest; he’s indicting the fantasy that language is a neutral tool for truth.
The subtext is about fluency as performance. To move between languages is to move between selves: you choose what’s sayable, what’s polite, what’s taboo, what emotion gets foregrounded. That flexibility can look like deceit to someone who wants identity to be singular and stable. Card’s line turns translation into a moral suspicion: if you can reframe yourself at will, what’s your “real” face?
Context matters because Card’s fiction is obsessed with communication as power - who controls narratives, who gets misread, who manipulates through rhetoric. In many of his worlds, miscommunication isn’t a glitch; it’s a governing system. So the insult reads less like anti-intellectualism and more like a warning about how language enables selective revelation. Every language offers different exits from accountability: ambiguity, softened agency, strategic politeness, even the simple ability to withhold information from the monolingual.
It’s also a provocation aimed at readers who equate eloquence with virtue. Card implies that the better you are with words, the easier it is to manufacture sincerity. The sting is that he’s not wrong - and he’s implicating himself, too, as a writer whose whole craft is making lies feel true.
The subtext is about fluency as performance. To move between languages is to move between selves: you choose what’s sayable, what’s polite, what’s taboo, what emotion gets foregrounded. That flexibility can look like deceit to someone who wants identity to be singular and stable. Card’s line turns translation into a moral suspicion: if you can reframe yourself at will, what’s your “real” face?
Context matters because Card’s fiction is obsessed with communication as power - who controls narratives, who gets misread, who manipulates through rhetoric. In many of his worlds, miscommunication isn’t a glitch; it’s a governing system. So the insult reads less like anti-intellectualism and more like a warning about how language enables selective revelation. Every language offers different exits from accountability: ambiguity, softened agency, strategic politeness, even the simple ability to withhold information from the monolingual.
It’s also a provocation aimed at readers who equate eloquence with virtue. Card implies that the better you are with words, the easier it is to manufacture sincerity. The sting is that he’s not wrong - and he’s implicating himself, too, as a writer whose whole craft is making lies feel true.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|
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