Frederik Pohl Quotes

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.

It is a constant wonder to me how crazy a sane person can get.

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

Don Kayman was too good a scientist to confuse his hopes with observations. He would report what he found. But he knew what he wanted to find.

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?

I don’t think you know what it’s like to have someone head over heels in love with you. What’s the good of a man who’s upside down?

Even money, thought Roger on the way back to his own office, is not a bad bet. Of course, it depends on the stakes.

Think of a frog as a functional machine designed to produce baby frogs. This is the Darwinian view, and is really what evolution is all about. In order to succeed, the frog has to stay alive long enough to grow up and get pregnant or get some female frog pregnant. That means it has to do two things. It has to eat. And it has to avoid being eaten.

All of them had been so tested and retested that they had acquired considerable skill in answering test questions the way the examiners wanted them answered.

A hundred and twenty million cases of the most deadly, most contagious…and least excusable…disease in medicine. For smallpox can infallibly be prevented, and only a world which had forgotten Jenner could have been taken by it unaware…or a world in which the memory of Jenner’s centuries-old prophylaxis had been systematically removed.

It is not true that girls are made of sugar and spice. These mysterious creatures, enameled of complexion, faintly scented with distant flower-fields and musk, constricted here and enlarged there – they are animals, as men are animals, sustained by the same sludgy trickle of partly fermented organic matter; and indeed with a host of earthy problems men need never know, the oestral flow, the burgeoning cells that replenish the race. Womanhood has always been a triumph of artifice over the animal within.

It was a wonder that so strange thing as a number should exist in the first place, rivalled only by the greater wonder that they should perform so obediently the work of mankind.

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.

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.

He drew himself up and said with dignity: “We administer justice, Mr. Courtenay. And an ancient, basic tenet of justice is: ‘Better that one thousand innocents suffer unjustly than one guilty person be permitted to escape.’”