Frederik Pohl Quotes
-
'See, there’s a bit of a problem here. It’s true that editors are always begging for something new and different, but if you’re dumb enough to try to give it to them they don’t recognize it. When they ask for ‘different,’ what they mean is something right down the good old ‘different’ groove.'
-
I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time.
-
Is there any of me, or of any of us, that isn’t just consequence?I think, and I’ve thought it over a lot, that everything that ever happened keeps on happening, extending tendrils of itself endlessly into the moving present tense of time, porducing its echoes, and explosions and extinctions forever.
-
Think of a frog as a functional machine designed to produce baby frogs. This is the Darwinian view, and is really what evolution is all about. In order to succeed, the frog has to stay alive long enough to grow up and get pregnant or get some female frog pregnant. That means it has to do two things. It has to eat. And it has to avoid being eaten.
-
Advertising reaches out to touch the fantasy part of people's lives. And you know, most people's fantasies are pretty sad.
-
In terms of stories I would buy for a science fiction magazine, if they take place in the future, that might do it.
-
The head of Fermilab was reading Astonishing Stories when he was ten.
-
Stories where the author has known very little, but run a computer program that tells him how to construct a planet, and looked up specific things about rocketry and so on, really suck.
-
Scientists are an agnostic lot, of course-well, most educated people are, aren’t they?
-
I don’t think you know what it’s like to have someone head over heels in love with you. What’s the good of a man who’s upside down?
-
'See, we don’t go in for your so-called ‘birth control’ here. No abortion. No contraception. We accept the gift of life when it is given. We believe that every human being, from the moment of conception on, has a right to a life-although,' he added, 'not necessarily a long one.'
-
Don Kayman was too good a scientist to confuse his hopes with observations. He would report what he found. But he knew what he wanted to find.
-
That’s power, Mitch, absolute power. And you know the old saying. Power ennobles. Absolute power ennobles absolutely.
-
A lot of the cosmologists and astrophysicists clearly had been reading science fiction.
-
It was a nasty day in late December, just before the holidays. The weather was cold, wet, and miserable-well, I said it was London, didn’t I?
-
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.
-
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.
-
Oh, it was work and no fooling. I enjoyed it very much, because I didn’t have to do it.
-
All of them had been so tested and retested that they had acquired considerable skill in answering test questions the way the examiners wanted them answered.
-
What will come of these things? That is a fair question. Unfortunately there is no answer. Not yet. If we knew the answer in advance, we would not have to perform the experiment.
-
'You could rule the nation-and yet you don’t seem to go after that power.'The mayor frowned. 'Power, Mrs. O’Hare? You mean the chance to make laws and compel others to do what you want them to? Why, good heavens, Mrs. O’Hare, who in his right mind would want that?'
-
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.’'
-
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.