Poul Anderson Quotes

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.

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

I was trying to avoid the cliché all too common in science fiction, even today, of a whole population feeling itself oppressed and waiting only for a leader to rise in a body against its overlords. No government for which that was actually the case could last a minute. There must always be a majority who have some stake in things as they are, whether that stake consist of wealth and power or simply of law, order, and predictability. Moreover, most people cannot really imagine any system working which is very different from the one they are used to. Hence they find rationalizations for it. Even slaves often do this.

His conscience must have gotten tired of nagging him and delivered an ultimatum.

Hurry and hurry, autumn leaves hurrying on the rainy wind, snow hurrying out of the sky, life hurrying to death, gods hurrying to oblivion.

Over unforced love, the gods themselves had no might.

Aghast, Tauno exclaimed, “but this is frightful!”
“Oh? Many would count it glorious good fortune.”
His eye stabbed at hers. “Would you?”
“Well… No.”
“Locked among bleak brick walls for all her days; shorn, harshly clad, ill-fed, droning through her nose at God while letting wither that which God put between her legs; never to know love, children about her, the growth of home and kin, or even wanderings under apple trees in blossom time.…”
“Tauno, it is the way to eternal bliss.”
“Hm. Rather would I have my bliss now, and then the dark. You, too—in your heart—not so?—whether or not you have said you mean to repent on your deathbed. Your Christian Heaven seems to me a shabby place to spend forever.”

Nothing in excess, including self-denial.

The best foundation that a decision is ever allowed is our fallible assessment of the probabilities.

And ninety-nine percent of the human race, no matter how smart they are, will do the convenient thing instead of the wise thing, and kid themselves into thinking they can somehow escape the consequences. We’re just built that way.

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.

Did ignorance save his freedom, or merely his illusion of freedom?

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.

As related, the bank was one of those eastern ones, with Roman pillars and cathedral dimness and, I suspect, a piece of Plymouth Rock in a reliquary.