Poul Anderson Quotes

My mother taught me a Spanish saying," he remarked, "that it takes four men to make a salad: a spendthrift for the oil, a philosopher for the seasonings, a miser for the vinegar, and a madman for the tossing.

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.

You cannot imagine how wearisome existence grows, alone and immortal.

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.

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.

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.

Like sensible people throughout history, the average Phoenician wanted as little to do with his government as possible.

We can hardly expect conventional respectability of a person whose goal in life is enlightenment.

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

Are you happy?
Your question is meaningless. I am occupied. I participate in operations, I am one with the accomplishments.

Her rank was higher than his, so high that no one in her family worked productively.

It would annoy me less that we’re heading into a new puritanical era if the puritanism concerned itself about things that matter.

Look, these were none of them supermen. In fact, they were either weaklings who’d been assigned civilian-type jobs, or warriors as ignorant and superstitious as brutal. Aside from what specialized training fitted them for Wallis’s purposes, he’d never tried to get them properly educated. If nothing else, that might have led to questioning of his righteousness and infallibility.

You know what they say about bold spacemen never becoming old spacemen.

History does not tend to the better, Doc, it does not, it does not. We imagine so because events have produced our glorious selves. Think, however. Put aside the romantic legends and look at the facts. The average Frenchman in 1800 was no more unfree than the average Englishman. The French Empire could have brought Europe together, and could have been liberalized from within, and there might have been no World War I in which Western civilization cut its own throat. Because that’s what’s happened, you know. We’re still busy bleeding to death, but we haven’t far to go now.