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Poul Anderson
186 quotes
“What, after all, what is the most logical way for superman to evolve? Not in one fantastic mutation of unknown thousands of genes all working to produce the same results: the very formulation was an insult to the laws of probability. No, homo superior should have evolved from homo sapiens in the same way that other species had evolved from a parent stock—by isolation of a few not very different mutations, selection and intensification of the new traits, new mutations gradually appearing and being lost if they were unfavorable, being incorporated if they gave some advantage.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Incomplete Superman, Future, March 1951, p. 24
“You know what they say about bold spacemen never becoming old spacemen.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) first seen 1952 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Garden in the Void" (1952)
“A man isn't really alive till he has something bigger than himself and his own little happiness, for which he'd gladly die.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ghetto" (1954)
“I was not speaking of minor ripples in the mainstream of history—certainly those are ruled by chance. But the broad current moves quite inexorably, I assure you.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cold Victory, in Scithers & Schweitzer (eds.) Another Round at the Spaceport Bar, p. 181. Originally appeared in Venture Science Fiction, May 1957
“It was true. Men died and civilization died, but before they died they lived. It was not altogether futile.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cold Victory, in Scithers & Schweitzer (eds.) Another Round at the Spaceport Bar, p. 181. Originally appeared in Venture Science Fiction, May 1957
“Time is the bridge that always burns behind us.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Burning Bridge, originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, January 1960
“Collectively as well as individually, man is never going to find perfection. Some societies he builds may work better, for the majority anyhow, than others. But all of them will have their built-in drawbacks. Their affairs will always be conducted with a high irreducible minimum of inefficiency. Read: sentimentalism, magical thinking, shortsightedness, vanity, greed, envy, hate, fear – not because we are evil but because we are mortal.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Comment on Last of the Deliverers, in Harry Harrison (ed.), SF: Author’s Choice, (1968), p. 44
“We live with our archetypes, but can we live in them?”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Fatal Fulfillment" (Short Story), March 1970. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
“They tell me our kind was friendly with the old gods, and with older gods before them. Yet never have we made offering or worship. I’ve tried and failed to understand such things. Does a god need flesh or gold? Does it matter to him how you live? Does it swerve him if you grovel and whimper? Does he care whether you care about him?”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A greedy man is an unlucky man.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Timidity can be as dangerous as rashness.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Saturn Game" (1981)
“Lord, that war was crazy!” “All wars are,” said Drummond dispassionately. “but technology advanced to the point of giving us a knife to cut our throats with. Before that, we were just beating our heads against the wall. Robinson, we can’t go back to the old ways. We’ve got to start on a new track—a track of sanity.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No, the only way to sanity—to survival—is to abandon class prejudice and race hate altogether, and work as individuals. We’re all...well, Earthlings, and subclassification is deadly. We all have to live together, and might as well make the best of it.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You were right. We should never have created science. It brought the twilight of the race.” “I never said that. The race brought its own destruction, through misuse of science. Our culture was scientific anyway, in all except its psychological basis. It’s up to us to take that last and hardest step. If we do, the race may yet survive.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One light-year is not much as galactic distances go. You could walk it in about 270 million years, beginning at the middle of the Permian Era, when dinosaurs belonged to the remote future, and continuing to the present day.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Don’t talk, you,” he said. “It hurts my ears. Nor think; that hurts your head.’”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When facts are insufficient, theorizing is ridiculous at best, misleading at worst.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One can surrender one’s rational will to beliefs or habits as easily as to individuals, for essentially the same reasons, and with essentially the same results. Ideas have a mystery and power of their own.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mystery is in a way the guarantee of the boundlessness of the might of the ruler: power bound to reason must always have limitations, great though it may be.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anderson demonstrates that if one accepts a sham mystery as real, one has stopped or strayed in the search for truth, and truth has survival value.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Freedom brings responsibility and often guilt. It may indeed provide a deeper satisfaction and a richer life, but the evaluation of such rewards is a distressingly subjective process. Perhaps no argument in favor of liberty can satisfy the intellect; perhaps the best we can hope for is a shared emotional conviction.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let’s stop making wild guesses and start gathering data.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Iskilip is senile, more than half converted to his own artificial creed. He was mumbling about prophecies Val Nira made long ago, true prophecies. Bah! Tricks of memory and wishfulness.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can’t be a telepath and remain any kind of prude. People’s lives were their own business, if they didn’t hurt anyone else too badly.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So why was a civilian going armed? It bespoke a degree of lawlessness that fitted ill with a technological society.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think most human misery is due to well-meaning fanatics like him.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For himself, he had never thought it would be this bad. He had stopped remembering her, except maybe ten times a day, but now she came to him and the forgetting would have to be done all over again.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man does not live by bread alone, nor guns, paperwork, theses, naked practicalities.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everard was not so sure; he had seen enough human misery in all the ages. You got case-hardened after a while, but down underneath, when a peasant stared at you with sick brutalized eyes, or a soldier screamed with a pike through him, or a city went up in radioactive flame, something wept. He could understand the fanatics who had tried to change events. It was only that their work was so unlikely to make anything better...”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He was no respecter of windy theories about inborn racial traits, but there was something to be said for traditions so ancient as to be unconscious and ineradicable.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You are very honest about the situation of your own country.” Deirdre said roughly, “Most of us won’t admit it, but I think it best to look truth in the eyes.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everard sighed, switched off his conscience, and began lying.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Say on. If you are a rogue, you are at least an interesting one.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like sensible people throughout history, the average Phoenician wanted as little to do with his government as possible.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m still spry, but I feel the teeth gnawing, and believe me, my friends, it was better to be young.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We must understand that what Pascal said is true of every human being in the whole of space-time, ourselves included—“The last act is tragic, however pleasant all the comedy of the other acts. A little earth on our heads, and all is done with forever.”—understand it in our bones, so that we can live with it calmly if not serenely.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What I’m trying to make you know, not in your forebrain but in your marrow, is that reality never conforms very well to the textbooks, and sometimes it doesn’t conform at all.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here was more than a question of law; it was a matter of whose will should prevail.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Know that against time the gods themselves are powerless.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I cannot believe you harbor any illusions about the barbarians being nature’s noblemen. I soon lost mine. They were every bit as ruthless. They were simply less efficient.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sincerity is the most overrated virtue in the catalogue.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What I want is to commune with the land. In company I couldn’t admit that. It’d sound too pompous, as though I were from Greenpeace or the People’s Republic of Berkeley.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Inland, all except criminals lived in a tightly pulled net of regulations, duties, social standing, tax collection, expectations of how to act and speak and think—“sort of like late twentieth-century USA” Everard grumbled to himself.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was a huge sadness in it—the little men of today, gnawing apart the mighty works they no longer understood. In a few hundred years, or a few thousand, what did it matter? Nothing would be left, nothing but rubble and waving grass and the wild dogs howling where men had once lived.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So this,” he said, “is the excitement and glory of war! I’ll never believe a ballad singer again.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wonder if there are any gods at all—if they aren’t just another story.” Tom and Owl shrank from him. But no lightning struck.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What was right? A man should live justly—but too often it was hard to say which was the road of justice. At any rate, this war was not a struggle of evil against good, black against white; it was a fight between many human beings, none of whom was wholly bad or wholly good.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His will grew tight again. This was no age for weaklings. You had to do whatever seemed best, without letting gods or men or the lower devils deter you.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A world of life and mystery, a world of splendor and striving and wistful beauty. Yes, it was good to live, and even if he was now to join the sun in an endless night, he was glad of what he had been given.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Peace,” he added, “is kept by the good will and strength of the peaceful.”
Poul Anderson (1926–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source