Frederik Pohl Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

He drew himself up and said with dignity: We administer justice, Mr. Courtenay. And an ancient, basic tenet of justice is: 'Better that one thousand innocents suffer unjustly than one guilty person be permitted to escape.'

Frederik Pohl
Anyway, that's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.

Frederik Pohl
When you spend weeks on end close to another person, so close that you know every hiccough, every smell and every scratch on the skin, you either come out of it hating each other or so deep in each other's gut that you can't find a way out. Klara and I were both. Our little love affair had turned into a Siamese-twin relationship. There wasn't any romance in it. There wasn't room enough between us for romance to occur. And yet I knew every inch of Klara, every pore, and every thought, far better than I'd known my own mother. And in the same way: from the womb out. I was surrounded by Klara.

Frederik Pohl
There is no greater dark than the dark between the stars.

Frederik Pohl
Advertising reaches out to touch the fantasy part of people's lives. And you know, most people's fantasies are pretty sad.

Frederik Pohl
I sat down in the back, calculating as best I could. Number forty-two. Say, at the most optimistic, an average of a minute and a half a case. That meant the judge would get to me in a little over an hour.

Frederik Pohl
Anybody who sets out to turn the world upside down has no right to complain if he gets caught in its gears.

Frederik Pohl
You don't think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending. accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes Hell's own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb.

Frederik Pohl
'Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time—'

That's the sort of thing she would have written before the rise of advertising. The correlation is perfectly clear. Advertising up, lyric poetry down.

Frederik Pohl
On this day I want to tell you about, which will be about a thousand years from now, there were a boy, a girl and a love story.

Frederik Pohl
It was an appeal to reason, and they're always dangerous. You can't trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it.

Frederik Pohl
When my mother died and left me it hurt, but I was poor and confused and used to hurting. When the love of my life, or at any rate the woman who seemed to come to be the love of my life after she was safely gone, also left me — without quite dying, because she was stuck in some awful astrophysical anomaly and far out of reach forever — that also hurt. But I was hurting all over anyway then. I wasn't used to happiness, hadn't formed the habit of it. There is a Carot's law to pain. It is measured not by absolutes, but the difference between source and ambience, and my ambience had been too safe and too pleasurable for too long to equip me for this. I was in shock.

Frederik Pohl
Our representative government now is perhaps more representative than it has ever been before in history. It is not necessarily representative per capita, but it most surely is ad valorem. If you like philosophical problems. Here is one for you: should each human being's vote register alike, as the lawbooks pretend and as some say the founders of our nation desired? Or should a vote be weighted according to the wisdom, the power, and the influence—that is, the money—of the voter?

Frederik Pohl
That's power, Mitch, absolute power. And you know the old saying. Power ennobles. Absolute power ennobles absolutely.

Frederik Pohl
But from outside there is no knowing which is true. From outside, there is a five-tenths chance that the cat's alive. But a cat can't be five-tenths alive.

Frederik Pohl
Increase of population was always good news to us. More people, more sales. Decrease of IQ was always good news to us. Less brains, more sales.

Frederik Pohl