Poul Anderson Quotes

No amount of money would stave off a nuclear warhead.

Something as biologically fundamental as death ought to be in the very fabric of evolution virtually from the beginning.

Over unforced love, the gods themselves had no might.

Do you think maybe I want power for myself? That’s for fools who want to command other fools.

“I think,” said John, “you’d do well to remember what one of our philosophers wrote. All evil is a good become cancerous.

What was right? A man should live justly—but too often it was hard to say which was the road of justice. At any rate, this war was not a struggle of evil against good, black against white; it was a fight between many human beings, none of whom was wholly bad or wholly good.

In Harvest of Stars, there is this notion, not original with me of course, that it will become possible to download at least the basic aspects of a human personality into a machine program...

Everard sighed, switched off his conscience, and began lying.

Collectively as well as individually, man is never going to find perfection. Some societies he builds may work better, for the majority anyhow, than others. But all of them will have their built-in drawbacks. Their affairs will always be conducted with a high irreducible minimum of inefficiency. Read: sentimentalism, magical thinking, shortsightedness, vanity, greed, envy, hate, fear – not because we are evil but because we are mortal.

A little careful pushing, and they’ll bury the hatchet all right—in each other.

Light fills the air, wind is aglow, drink of it, breathe of it, make leafing. Rainfall sows itself, it grows down through soil to the secret places where stones abide; it brings the strength of them up rootward. Lie still, molder away, then be again grass.

Absolute proof of absolute knowledge is impossible.

Let’s stop making wild guesses and start gathering data.

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

The end of the world—was the sky going to open up, would the angels pour down the vials of wrath on a shaking land, and would God appear to judge the sons of men? He listened for the noise of great galloping hoofs, but there was only the wind in the trees.
That was the worst of it. The sky didn’t care. The Earth went on turning through an endlessness of dark and silence, and what happened in the thin scum seething over its crust didn’t matter.