Frederik Pohl Quotes (36 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

Frederik Pohl

Frederik Pohl: 36 quotes 0 likes

Famous Frederik Pohl Quotes

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”

Frederik Pohl

“Advertising reaches out to touch the fantasy part of people's lives. And you know, most people's fantasies are pretty sad.”

Frederik Pohl

The Way The Future Was, (autobiography, 1978)

“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 book The Space Merchants

Source: The Space Merchants (1953), Chapter 2 (p. 15)

“They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever… and the other one scared me out of my mind.”

Frederik Pohl book Gateway

Source: Gateway

“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.”

Frederik Pohl

I Remember a Winter (p. 139)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

“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 book The Space Merchants

Source: The Space Merchants (1953), Chapter 8 (p. 103)

Frederik Pohl Quotes about the trip

“When you spend weeks on end close to another person, so close that you know every hiccough, every smell and every scratch on the skin, you either come out of it hating each other or so deep in each other's gut that you can't find a way out. Klara and I were both. Our little love affair had turned into a Siamese-twin relationship. There wasn't any romance in it. There wasn't room enough between us for romance to occur. And yet I knew every inch of Klara, every pore, and every thought, far better than I'd known my own mother. And in the same way: from the womb out. I was surrounded by Klara.”

Frederik Pohl book Gateway

Gateway (1978)

“Even money, thought Roger on the way back to his own office, is not a bad bet. Of course, it depends on the stakes.”

Frederik Pohl book Man Plus

Source: Man Plus (1976), Chapter 6, “Mortal in Mortal Fear” (p. 74)

“She laughed out loud. It was a very nice laugh. No girl looks beautiful when she’s laughing hard, and girls who worry about looking beautiful don’t do it. Dorotha Keefer looked like a healthy, pretty girl having a good time, which when you come down to it is about the best way for a girl to look.”

Frederik Pohl

The Merchants of Venus (p. 22)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

“He said in an injured tone: “Mister, naturally the staff won’t bother your stuff. What kind of a hotel do you think this is?
“Of course, of course,” I said. But I knew he was lying, because I knew what kind of hotel it was. The staff was there only because being there gave them a chance to knock down more money than they could make any other way. What other kind of hotel was there?”

Frederik Pohl

The Gold at the Starbow’s End (p. 381)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

“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.”

Frederik Pohl book Man Plus

Source: Man Plus (1976), Chapter 4, “Group of Probable Pallbearers” (p. 41)

Frederik Pohl Quotes about thinking

“You don’t think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell’s own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb.”

Frederik Pohl

Day Million (p. 441)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

“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?”

Frederik Pohl book Man Plus

Source: Man Plus (1976), Chapter 7, “Mortal Becoming Monster” (p. 81)

“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.”

Frederik Pohl book Man Plus

Source: Man Plus (1976), Chapter 5, “Monster Becoming Mortal Again” (p. 50)

Frederik Pohl Quotes

“There is a Carot's law to pain. It is measured not by absolutes, but the difference between source and ambience, and my ambience had been too safe and too pleasurable for too long to equip me for this.”

Frederik Pohl book Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980)
Context: When my mother died and left me it hurt, but I was poor and confused and used to hurting. When the love of my life, or at any rate the woman who seemed to come to be the love of my life after she was safely gone, also left me — without quite dying, because she was stuck in some awful astrophysical anomaly and far out of reach forever — that also hurt. But I was hurting all over anyway then. I wasn't used to happiness, hadn't formed the habit of it. There is a Carot's law to pain. It is measured not by absolutes, but the difference between source and ambience, and my ambience had been too safe and too pleasurable for too long to equip me for this. I was in shock.

Pain , Pleasure , Law

“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.”

Frederik Pohl book Gateway

Gateway (1978)

Life , Learning

“That’s power, Mitch, absolute power. And you know the old saying. Power ennobles. Absolute power ennobles absolutely.”

Frederik Pohl book The Space Merchants

Source: The Space Merchants (1953), Chapter 4 (p. 44)

“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.”

Frederik Pohl book Man Plus

Source: Man Plus (1976), Chapter 14, “Missionary to Mars” (p. 190)

Hope

“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.”

Frederik Pohl

The Gold at the Starbow’s End (p. 349)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

Question

“Oh, it was work and no fooling. I enjoyed it very much, because I didn’t have to do it.”

Frederik Pohl

The Knights of Arthur (p. 398)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

Fools

“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.”

Frederik Pohl

I Remember a Winter (p. 222)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

Life , Birth

““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?””

Frederik Pohl

Servant of the People (p. 254)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

Law , Chance

“There’s an editor for you.
They’re all the same. At first they’re all honey and sweet talk, with those long alcoholic lunches and blue-sky conversation about million-copy printings while they wheedle you into signing the contract. Then they turn nasty. They want the actual book delivered. When they don’t get it, or when the censors say they can’t print it, then there isn’t any more sweet talk and all the conversation is about how the aediles will escort you to debtors’ prison.”

Frederik Pohl

Waiting for the Olympians (p. 257)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

Alcohol , Books

“She described herself as happy. This diagnosis did not come from any welling up of joy inside herself. It came from the observed fact, looking at herself objectively, that whenever she decided she wanted something she always got it, and what other definition of happiness could there be?”

Frederik Pohl book Man Plus

Source: Man Plus (1976), Chapter 11, “Dorothy Louise Mintz Torraway as Penelope” (p. 146)

Joy , Happiness

“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 book The Space Merchants

Source: The Space Merchants (1953), Chapter 9 (p. 111)

People

“Specialization is the goal of civilization.”

Frederik Pohl

My Lady Green Sleeves (p. 88)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

“I found a man who claimed he used to be a radio engineer. And if he was an engineer, I was Albert Einstein’s mother, but at least he knew which end of a soldering iron was hot.”

Frederik Pohl

The Knights of Arthur (p. 398)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

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

Frederik Pohl book The Space Merchants

Source: The Space Merchants (1953), Chapter 8 (p. 105)

World

“I delighted his fussy little soul, because by adding what I remembered of Navy protocol to what he was able to teach me of Army routine, we came up with as snarled a mass of red tape as any field-grade officer in the whole history of all armed forces had been able to accumulate. Oh, I tell you, nobody sneezed in New York without a report being made out in triplicate, with eight endorsements.
Of course there wasn’t anybody to send them to, but that didn’t stop the Major. He said with determination: “Nobody’s ever going to chew me out for noncompliance with regulations—even if I have to invent the regulations myself!””

Frederik Pohl

The Knights of Arthur (p. 394)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

Soul , History

“There is no greater dark than the dark between the stars.”

Frederik Pohl book Heechee Rendezvous

Heechee Rendezvous (1984)

Star

“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 book The Space Merchants

Source: The Space Merchants (1953), Chapter 16 (p. 186)

Justice , Suffering , Personality

“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.”

Frederik Pohl

Waiting for the Olympians (p. 272)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

Problem

“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?”

Frederik Pohl

Waiting for the Olympians (p. 255)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

Holiday , Weather

“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 book The Space Merchants

Source: The Space Merchants (1953), Chapter 4 (p. 48)

Silence , Time

“Scientists are an agnostic lot, of course—well, most educated people are, aren’t they?”

Frederik Pohl

Waiting for the Olympians (p. 269)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

People , Education

“You could rule the nation—and yet you don’t seem to go after that power.”

Frederik Pohl

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?”
Servant of the People (p. 254)
Platinum Pohl (2005)