Frederik Pohl Quotes

He wasn’t very confident of analysis as a solution to his problem; despite three centuries, the technique of mental health had never evolved a rigorous proof system, and Cornut was innately skeptical of whatever was not susceptible of mathematical analysis.

What helped most of all was the utter joy Cornut took in it all. It was, after all, his life. As he led the class, he felt again the wonder he himself had felt, sitting in a class like this one. He hardly heard the buzz from the class as he put his pointer down to gesture, and blindly picked it up again, still talking. Teaching mathematics was a kind of hypnosis for him, an intense, gut-wrenching absorption that had gripped him from the time of his first math class.

When my mother died and left me it hurt, but I was poor and confused and used to hurting. When the love of my life, or at any rate the woman who seemed to come to be the love of my life after she was safely gone, also left me — without quite dying, because she was stuck in some awful astrophysical anomaly and far out of reach forever — that also hurt. But I was hurting all over anyway then. I wasn't used to happiness, hadn't formed the habit of it. There is a Carot's law to pain. It is measured not by absolutes, but the difference between source and ambience, and my ambience had been too safe and too pleasurable for too long to equip me for this. I was in shock.

Anybody who sets out to turn the world upside down has no right to complain if he gets caught in its gears.

Would it help, do you think, if I canceled this operation and tried to get you, the other you, on the phone? President-to-President? A one-on-one talk?"
"Why, I think that would depend on what you said, Mr. President," she said thoughtfully.
"I'd say the truth!" he barked. "Might be an interesting change, at that.

Increase of population was always good news to us. More people, more sales. Decrease of IQ was always good news to us. Less brains, more sales.

There’s an editor for you.
They’re all the same. At first they’re all honey and sweet talk, with those long alcoholic lunches and blue-sky conversation about million-copy printings while they wheedle you into signing the contract. Then they turn nasty. They want the actual book delivered. When they don’t get it, or when the censors say they can’t print it, then there isn’t any more sweet talk and all the conversation is about how the aediles will escort you to debtors’ prison.

That’s power, Mitch, absolute power. And you know the old saying. Power ennobles. Absolute power ennobles absolutely.

I delighted his fussy little soul, because by adding what I remembered of Navy protocol to what he was able to teach me of Army routine, we came up with as snarled a mass of red tape as any field-grade officer in the whole history of all armed forces had been able to accumulate. Oh, I tell you, nobody sneezed in New York without a report being made out in triplicate, with eight endorsements.
Of course there wasn’t anybody to send them to, but that didn’t stop the Major. He said with determination: “Nobody’s ever going to chew me out for noncompliance with regulations—even if I have to invent the regulations myself!”

Anyway, that's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.

Scientists are an agnostic lot, of course—well, most educated people are, aren’t they?

What will come of these things? That is a fair question. Unfortunately there is no answer. Not yet. If we knew the answer in advance, we would not have to perform the experiment.

A soft drink and a couple of Twinkies didn’t make a meal, but at least they informed my stomach my intentions were good.

She described herself as happy. This diagnosis did not come from any welling up of joy inside herself. It came from the observed fact, looking at herself objectively, that whenever she decided she wanted something she always got it, and what other definition of happiness could there be?

Specialization is the goal of civilization.