Poul Anderson Quotes

You can’t be a telepath and remain any kind of prude. People’s lives were their own business, if they didn’t hurt anyone else too badly.

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

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

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

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

Holger wished he had read the old tales more closely; he had only a dim childhood recollection of them.

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.

Man’s duty in this life, he thought, is to choose the lesser evil.

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

Timidity can be as dangerous as rashness.

You have to have some kind of morality," he said.
"Sure. Like you have to have motives for doing anything at all. Still, I think we're beyond that smug sort of code which proclaimed crusades and burned heretics and threw dissenters into concentration camps. We need more personal and less public honor.

Corruption rewards its favorites with jobs.

Is that all he wants?" McCready wondered. "Shuffling papers in an office, forever?

Then they died.
And other men came after them. Wars flamed up and burned out; the howling peoples dwelt in smashed cities and kindled their fires with books.

I wrote the first book, Harvest of Stars, and as I was writing it, I saw that certain implications had barely been touched on... It's perfectly obvious that two completely revolutionary things are going on, with cybernetics, and biological science.