Poul Anderson
159 quotes
Biography
"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."
"You know what they say about bold spacemen never becoming old spacemen."
"A man isn't really alive till he has something bigger than himself and his own little happiness, for which he'd gladly die."
"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."
"It was true. Men died and civilization died, but before they died they lived. It was not altogether futile."
"Time is the bridge that always burns behind us."
"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."
"We live with our archetypes, but can we live in them?"
"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?"
"A greedy man is an unlucky man."
"Timidity can be as dangerous as rashness."
"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."
"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."
"“Don’t talk, you,” he said. “It hurts my ears. Nor think; that hurts your head.’”"
"When facts are insufficient, theorizing is ridiculous at best, misleading at worst."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Let’s stop making wild guesses and start gathering data."
"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."
"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."
"So why was a civilian going armed? It bespoke a degree of lawlessness that fitted ill with a technological society."
"I think most human misery is due to well-meaning fanatics like him."
"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."