Top 34 Quotes & Sayings by Poul Anderson

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Why do people in this age think their own impoverished lives must be the norm of the universe?

Happier are all men than the dwellers in Faerie – or the gods, for that matter…Better a life like a falling star, bright across the dark, than a deathlessness that can see naught above or beyond itself…the day draws nigh when Faerie shall fade, the Erlking himself shrink to a woodland sprite and then to nothing, and the gods go under. And the worst of it is, I cannot believe it wrong that the immortals will not live forever.

Will none wipe the sneer off the face of the cosmos?

Let us settle down to the serious business of getting drunk.

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

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

Timidity can be as dangerous as rashness.

My knowledge of the human psyche is as yet imperfect. Certain areas won't yield to computation.

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

Give fear no hold on you. Keep sinews loose and senses open, ready at every instant to flow with the rush of action.

In my considered opinion, the profit to be made by permanent settlement in space is nothing less than the survival of industrial civilization, and therefore the survival of nearly the entire human race, along with such amenities as peace, freedom, enough to eat, and the chance to reach a high age in good health.

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

At each stage...entirely new laws, concepts and generalizations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one.

A fanatic is a man who, when he's lost sight of his purpose, redoubles his effort.

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

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.

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.

It is a truism that the structure of a society is basically determined by its technology. Not in an absolute sense-there may be totally different cultures using identical tools-but the tools settle the possibilities; you can't have interstellar trade without spaceships. A race limited to a single planet, possessing a high knowledge of mechanics but with its basic machines of industry and war requiring a large capital investment, will inevitably tend toward collectivism under one name or another. Free enterprise needs elbow room.

Heaven is not as narrowly literal-minded as hell.

Anybody can find infinite Mandelbrot figures in his navel.

Better a life like a falling star, brief bright across the dark, than the long, long waiting of the immortals, loveless and cheerlessly wise.

The fish that first ventured ashore had considerable practical problems.

I think the first duty of all art, including fiction of any kind, is to entertain. That is to say, to hold interest. No matter how worthy the message of something, if it's dull, you're just not communicating.

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

There are some ideas so stupid that only intellectuals can believe in them, particularly left-wing intellectuals.

Colonization means potential immortality for the human genus. Man's safety on Earth was never great, and it dwindles hourly. Disarmament, even world government, will not guarantee survival in an age when population presses natural resources to the limit and when the knowledge of how to work mischief on a planetary scale is ever more widely diffused among peoples who may grow ever more desperate.

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

Two lives met across death and centuries. To ask what it meant is meaningless. There is no destiny. But sometimes there is bravery