Frederik Pohl - The Space Merchants (1953)

7 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
'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
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