Poul Anderson Quotes

75 Sourced Quotes

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

Poul Anderson
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.

Poul Anderson
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...

Poul Anderson
We live with our archetypes, but can we live in them?

Poul Anderson
If we knew exactly what to expect throughout the Solar System, we would have no reason to explore it.

Poul Anderson
Do you actually hope to convert the whole of mankind?
Belay that! Anyhow, if you mean, Do we hope to make everybody into copies of us? The answer is, No. Mind, I'm not in Parliament or Admiralty, but I follow debates and I read the philosophers. One trouble with the old machine culture was that, by its nature, it did force people to become more and more alike. Not only did this fail in the end—disastrously—but to the extent it succeeded, it was a worse disaster. Lohannaso smote the rail with a mighty fist. Damnation, Thomas! We need all the diversity, all the assorted ways of living and looking and thinking, we can get!

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

Poul Anderson
Above everything else, perhaps, was today's concept of working together. I don't mean its totalitarian version, for which Jack Havig had total loathing, or that togetherness, be it in a corporation or a commune, which he despised. I mean an enlightened pragmatism that rejects self-appointed aristocrats, does not believe received doctrine is necessarily true, stands ready to hear and weigh what anyone has to offer, and maintains well-developed channels to carry all ideas to the leadership and back again.

Poul Anderson
A fanatic's willingness to kill or be killed in the service of a cause cannot prove the rightness of that cause.

Poul Anderson
The single definition of government I've ever seen that makes sense is that it's the organization which claims the right to kill people who won't do what it wants.

Poul Anderson
Don't get me wrong. These people are mine. I like and in many ways admire them. They're the salt of the earth. It's simply that I want other condiments too.

Poul Anderson
The cell is a sea where molecules drift on thermal tides.

Poul Anderson
Machines can only find what ignorant men have programmed them to find.

Poul Anderson
These lands are not always calm. We may well have more adventures ahead of us. But we shall meet them with high hearts.

Poul Anderson
He had seen too much of the cosmos to have any great faith in man's ability to understand it.

Poul Anderson
A cultured, sensitive, observant man is a pleasure to be with in any age.

Poul Anderson
I really liked that girl.
Not loved, evidently, I observed.
N-n-no. I supposed not. Though what is love, anyway? Doesn't it have so infinitely many kinds and degrees and mutations and quantum jumps that— Never mind.

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

Poul Anderson
Be calm. A man can do but little. Enough if that little be right.

Poul Anderson
You should pay no heed to what some yokel priest has prated of. What does he know?

Poul Anderson
Heim ignored the mob scene on the 3V, rested his eyes on the cold serenity of the Milky Way and thought that this, at least, would endure.

Poul Anderson
A man isn't really alive till he has something bigger than himself and his own little happiness, for which he'd gladly die.

Poul Anderson
Are you that afraid to die?
No. I simply like to live.

Poul Anderson
Men, whose span is cruelly short, rush nonetheless to death in their youth as to a maiden's arms.

Poul Anderson
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.

Poul Anderson
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.

Poul Anderson
The air was cold and smelled of earth. Birds twittered. Beyond one or two hundred years back, Havig once said to me, the daytime sky is always full of wings.

Poul Anderson
I think you look on death as your friend, she murmured. That is a strange friend for a young man to have.
The only faithful friend in this world, he said. Death is always sure to be at your side.

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

Poul Anderson
She rarely saw priest—and knowing her heart sinned, was glad of that. Dreary was a church after the woodlands and hills and sounding sea. She still loved God—and was not the earth His work, and a church only man's?—but she could not bring herself to call on Him very often.

Poul Anderson