Poul Anderson Quotes

Anybody can find infinite Mandelbrot figures in his navel.

The fact is, man has never stayed by a single ideal. The mass enthusiasm when you were young gave way to cool, rationalistic classicism. Today that's being drowned in turn by a kind of neoromanticism. God knows where that will lead. I probably won't approve. Regardless, new generations grow up. We've no right to freeze them into our own mold. The universe is too wide.

Magic!' cried an old man. 'Tis sorcery, and we are undone!' 'Not so,' I told him, 'Sorcery cannot harm good Christians.' 'But I am a miserable sinner,' he wailed.

He had seen too much of the cosmos to have any great faith in man's ability to understand it.

Timidity can be as dangerous as rashness.

Happier are all men than the dwellers in Faerie – or the gods, for that matter…Better a life like a falling star, bright across the dark, than a deathlessness that can see naught above or beyond itself…the day draws nigh when Faerie shall fade, the Erlking himself shrink to a woodland sprite and then to nothing, and the gods go under. And the worst of it is, I cannot believe it wrong that the immortals will not live forever.

In my considered opinion, the profit to be made by permanent settlement in space is nothing less than the survival of industrial civilization, and therefore the survival of nearly the entire human race, along with such amenities as peace, freedom, enough to eat, and the chance to reach a high age in good health.

We can't go on ... having regular bowel movements ... while creation happens!

That,' he confessed aloud, 'was as ludicrous a case of mutual ineptitude as the gods of slapstick ever engineered. We both deserve to be tickled to death by small green centipedes. Well ... if you keep quiet about it, I will.

In Harvest of Stars, there is this notion, not original with me of course, that it will become possible to download at least the basic aspects of a human personality into a machine program.

Ninety-nine per cent of the human race, no matter how smart they are, will do the convenient thing instead of the wise thing, and kid themselves into thinking they can somehow escape the consequences.

Momentarily a wing of zodiacal radiance could be seen, like a halo over the rising fire-disk.

So much American science fiction is parochial
not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same ideals, the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier technology. Well, you know darn well it doesn't work that way ...

Their flight was not less exhilarating for being explainable.

A fanatic's willingness to kill or be killed in the service of a cause cannot prove the rightness of that cause.

Colonization means potential immortality for the human genus. Man's safety on Earth was never great, and it dwindles hourly. Disarmament, even world government, will not guarantee survival in an age when population presses natural resources to the limit and when the knowledge of how to work mischief on a planetary scale is ever more widely diffused among peoples who may grow ever more desperate.

Let us settle down to the serious business of getting drunk.

I'll have to jump around like sodium in the rain.

I wrote the first book, Harvest of Stars, and as I was writing it, I saw that certain implications had barely been touched on ... It's perfectly obvious that two completely revolutionary things are going on, with cybernetics, and biological science.

Will none wipe the sneer of the face of the cosmos?

I think the first duty of all art, including fiction of any kind, is to entertain. That is to say, to hold interest. No matter how worthy the message of something, if it's dull, you're just not communicating.
-Poul_Anderson

A man can do but little. Enough if that little be right.

So softly you hear it now, Mary O'Meara, but soon it comes joyful and clear.
And soon in the shadow and dew of your hilltop a star-guided footfall rings near.
My only beloved, I'm here.

You simply do not understand the human condition," said the robot.

Hah! Do you think you do, you conceited hunk of animated tin?"

Yes, I believe so, thanks ot my study of the authors, poets, and critics who devote their lives to the exploration and description of Man. Your Miss Forelle is a noble soul. Ever since I looked upon my first copy of that exquisitely sensitive literary quarterly she edits, I have failed to understand what she sees in you. To be sure," IZK-99 mused, "the relationship is not unlike that between the nun and the Diesel engine in Regret for Two Doves, but still… At any rate, if Miss Forelle has finally told you to go soak your censored head in expurgated wastes and then put the unprintable thing in an improbable place, I for one heartily approve.

Tunny, who was no mamma's boy - he had worked his way through college as a whale herder and bossed construction gangs on Mars - was so appalled by the robot's language that he could only whisper, "She did not. She said nothing of the sort."

I did not mean it literally," IZK-99 explained. "I was only quoting the renunciation scene in Gently Come Twilight. By Stichling, you know - almost as sensitive a writer as Brochet.

Machines can only find what ignorant men have programmed them to find.

Two lives met across death and centuries. To ask what it meant is meaningless. There is no destiny. But sometimes there is bravery

The same fight was being waged, here the Nazis and there the Middle World; but in both places, Chaos against Law, something old and wild and blind at war with man and the works of man.

It is a truism that the structure of a society is basically determined by its technology. Not in an absolute sense-there may be totally different cultures using identical tools-but the tools settle the possibilities; you can't have interstellar trade without spaceships. A race limited to a single planet, possessing a high knowledge of mechanics but with its basic machines of industry and war requiring a large capital investment, will inevitably tend toward collectivism under one name or another. Free enterprise needs elbow room.

Our species is gifted where it comes to interpreting doctrine so as to justify whatever one wants to do.

The fish that first ventured ashore had considerable practical problems.

There are some ideas so stupid that only intellectuals can believe in them, particularly left-wing intellectuals.

Who can we trust with a monopoly of the planet killer weapons and unlimited powers of inspection and arrest? Why, a country big and modern enough to make peace-keeping a major industry; but not big enough to conquer anyone else or force its will on anyone without the support of a majority of nations; and reasonably well thought of by everyone. In short, Sweden.

Why do most people think their own impoverished lives must be the norm of the universe?