Poul Anderson Quotes
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I walk beyond town, many of these nights, to stand under the high autumnal stars, look upward and wonder.
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We're mortal - which is to say, we're ignorant, stupid, and sinful - but those are only handicaps. Our pride is that nevertheless, now and then, we do our best. A few times we succeed. What more dare we ask for?
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He was no respecter of windy theories about inborn racial traits, but there was something to be said for traditions so ancient as to be unconscious and ineradicable.
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A cultured, sensitive, observant man is a pleasure to be with in any age.
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Inland, all except criminals lived in a tightly pulled net of regulations, duties, social standing, tax collection, expectations of how to act and speak and think-'sort of like late twentieth-century USA' Everard grumbled to himself.
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'Your son was in your own tradition.''Better, I hope,' said the old man. 'There would be little sense to existence, did boys have no chance to be more than their fathers.'
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A man isn't really alive till he has something bigger than himself and his own little happiness, for which he'd gladly die.
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His conscience must have gotten tired of nagging him and delivered an ultimatum.
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He’d seen too often how little of the universe is designed for man to neglect any safety measure.
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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.
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Did ignorance save his freedom, or merely his illusion of freedom?
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What five books would I like to be remembered for? Well... Tau Zero, I like that one especially. It was somewhat of a tour de force, and I think it got across what I was trying for.
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'My mother taught me a Spanish saying,' he remarked, 'that it takes four men to make a salad: a spendthrift for the oil, a philosopher for the seasonings, a miser for the vinegar, and a madman for the tossing.'
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I cannot believe you harbor any illusions about the barbarians being nature’s noblemen. I soon lost mine. They were every bit as ruthless. They were simply less efficient.
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What I’m trying to make you know, not in your forebrain but in your marrow, is that reality never conforms very well to the textbooks, and sometimes it doesn’t conform at all.
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Bombing: A method of warfare which delivers high explosives from the air, condemned because of its effects upon women, children, the aged, the sick, and other non-combatants, unless these happen to have resided in Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Osaka, etc., though not Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Cf. missile.
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Everard sighed, switched off his conscience, and began lying.
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You can have more adventure in an hour’s walk through a forest than in a year on a spaceship.
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What’s to explain? I’ve scant use for those types whose chief interest is their grubby little personal neuroses. Not in a universe as rich as this.
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As related, the bank was one of those eastern ones, with Roman pillars and cathedral dimness and, I suspect, a piece of Plymouth Rock in a reliquary.
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I think most human misery is due to well-meaning fanatics like him.
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So much American science fiction is parochial - not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same ideals, the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier technology. Well, you know darn well it doesn't work that way...
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The old man murmured: 'Aye, we draw to an end. Dying hurts. Nonetheless the forefathers were wise who in their myths made Nan coequal with Lesu. A thing which endured forever would become unendurable. Death opens a way, for peoples as well as for people.'
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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.'