Poul Anderson Quotes

Do you know," said Maclaren, "there is one sin which is punished with unfailing certainty, and must therefore be the deadliest sin in all time. Stupidity.

It was lonely, not even knowing yourself.

Your trouble is, the Old Faith reinforces every wish to kill that war has roused in you.

Nothing in excess, including self-denial.

Before the spirit could seek into it, the mind must. She studied the tensor equations as once she studied the sutras, she meditated upon the koans of science, and at last she began to feel her oneness with all that was, and in the vision find peace.

If anything does change man," he said, "it's science and technology. Just think about the fact—while it lasts—that parents need not take for granted some of their babies will die. You get a completely different concept of what a child is.

“He says giants built it in the morning of the world,” Hanno told Pytheas.
“Then his people are as ignorant as we,” the Greek said low.

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.

For the ordinary man, instability—change—means dislocation, war, uncertainty, misery, and death.

You can have more adventure in an hour’s walk through a forest than in a year on a spaceship.

Peace," he added, "is kept by the good will and strength of the peaceful.

Well, everybody got stupid now and then, especially in war.

The air was cold and smelled of earth. Birds twittered. “Beyond one or two hundred years back,” Havig once said to me, “the daytime sky is always full of wings.”

“Your Eminence is as great a man as I have ever met.”
“Then God have mercy on humankind,” Richelieu replied.

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.