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Poul Anderson Quotes
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Poul William Anderson was an American science fiction author who began his career during the Golden Age of the genre and continued to write and remain popular into the 21st century. Anderson also authored several works of fantasy, historical novels, and a prodigious number of short stories. He received numerous awards for his writing, including seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards.

✵ 25. November 1926 – 31. July 2001
Poul Anderson photo
Poul Anderson: 140   quotes 0   likes

Poul Anderson Quotes

“History does not tend to the better, Doc, it does not, it does not. We imagine so because events have produced our glorious selves. Think, however. Put aside the romantic legends and look at the facts. The average Frenchman in 1800 was no more unfree than the average Englishman. The French Empire could have brought Europe together, and could have been liberalized from within, and there might have been no World War I in which Western civilization cut its own throat. Because that’s what’s happened, you know. We’re still busy bleeding to death, but we haven’t far to go now.”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 5 (pp. 50-51)

Death , War , World , Imagination

“I say that a God who would come between two who have been to each other what we have been, is not one I would heed.”

Poul Anderson book The Broken Sword

Source: The Broken Sword (1954), Chapter 20 (p. 141)

God

“Tis colder outside than a well-born maiden’s heart.”

Poul Anderson book The Broken Sword

Source: The Broken Sword (1954), Chapter 24 (p. 171)

Heart

“Look, these were none of them supermen. In fact, they were either weaklings who’d been assigned civilian-type jobs, or warriors as ignorant and superstitious as brutal. Aside from what specialized training fitted them for Wallis’s purposes, he’d never tried to get them properly educated. If nothing else, that might have led to questioning of his righteousness and infallibility.”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 15 (p. 165)

Education , Question , Training

“Say on. If you are a rogue, you are at least an interesting one.”

Poul Anderson

Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks (p. 286)
Time Patrol

“Like sensible people throughout history, the average Phoenician wanted as little to do with his government as possible.”

Poul Anderson

Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks (p. 313)
Time Patrol

People , History

“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.”

Poul Anderson

The Sorrow of Odin the Goth (p. 387)
Time Patrol

Reality

“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.”

Poul Anderson

Star of the Sea (p. 523)
Time Patrol

Nature

“What I want is to commune with the land. In company I couldn’t admit that. It’d sound too pompous, as though I were from Greenpeace or the People’s Republic of Berkeley.”

Poul Anderson

The Year of the Ransom (p. 643)
Time Patrol

People , Communication

“Life was too short for anything but amusement at the human race.”

Poul Anderson book The Enemy Stars

Source: The Enemy Stars (1959), Chapter 5 (p. 38)

Life

“Timidity can be as dangerous as rashness.”

Poul Anderson book The Saturn Game

"The Saturn Game" (1981)
Short fiction

“There really wasn’t much in a man’s life that mattered. But those few things mattered terribly.”

Poul Anderson book The Star Fox

Section 3 “Admiralty”, Chapter IX (p. 200)
The Star Fox (1965)

Life

“Do you know,” said Maclaren, “there is one sin which is punished with unfailing certainty, and must therefore be the deadliest sin in all time. Stupidity.”

Poul Anderson book The Enemy Stars

Source: The Enemy Stars (1959), Chapter 8 (pp. 62-63)

Stupidity , Time

“His conscience must have gotten tired of nagging him and delivered an ultimatum.”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 10 (p. 104)

“"I've heard assorted rhapsodies about humankind going to the stars, of course. Who hasn't? Each of them founders on the practical problems."
"The fish that first ventured ashore had considerable practical problems."”

Poul Anderson

Source: Harvest of Stars (1993), Ch. 40

Star , Problem , Fish

“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

Poul Anderson: Fifty Years of Science Fiction (1997)

Star , Personality

“I do not think the coerced mind ever really learns an art.”

Poul Anderson book The Enemy Stars

Source: The Enemy Stars (1959), Chapter 3 (p. 20)

Art , Thinking , Learning

“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.”

Poul Anderson book The Star Fox

Section 1 “Marque and Reprisal”, Chapter V (pp. 37-38)
The Star Fox (1965)

Men , Season

“You can have more adventure in an hour’s walk through a forest than in a year on a spaceship.”

Poul Anderson book The Enemy Stars

Source: The Enemy Stars (1959), Chapter 12 (p. 103)

“We must understand that what Pascal said is true of every human being in the whole of space-time, ourselves included—“The last act is tragic, however pleasant all the comedy of the other acts. A little earth on our heads, and all is done with forever.”—understand it in our bones, so that we can live with it calmly if not serenely.”

Poul Anderson

The Sorrow of Odin the Goth (p. 343)
Time Patrol

Understanding , Time

“One man, one vote: A legal doctrine requiring that, from time to time, old gerrymanders be replaced with new ones. The object of this is the achievement of genuine democracy.”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 3 (p. 30)

Democracy , Time

“Her rank was higher than his, so high that no one in her family worked productively.”

Poul Anderson book The Enemy Stars

Source: The Enemy Stars (1959), Chapter 1 (p. 4)

Family

“Better a life like a falling star, bright across the dark, than a deathlessness which can see naught above or beyond itself.”

Poul Anderson book The Broken Sword

In the first edition of the book, this quote reads: Better a life like a falling star, brief and bright across the dark, than the long, long waiting of the immortals, loveless and cheerlessly wise.
Source: The Broken Sword (1954), Chapter 28 (p. 206)

Life , Star

“Keep on thinking. Keep your thinking close to the ground, where it belongs. Don’t ever trade your liberty for another man’s offer to do your thinking and make your mistakes for you.”

Poul Anderson book Brain Wave

Source: Brain Wave (1954), Chapter 3 (p. 25)

Thinking

“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.”

Poul Anderson

Delenda Est (p. 192)
Time Patrol

“I’ll give you one thing to mull over, though. If the body’s such a valueless piece of pork, and we’ll all meet each other in the sweet bye and bye, and so on, why’re you busting every gut you own to get back to your wife?”

Poul Anderson book The Enemy Stars

Source: The Enemy Stars (1959), Chapter 11 (p. 87)

““You are very honest about the situation of your own country.”
Deirdre said roughly, “Most of us won’t admit it, but I think it best to look truth in the eyes.””

Poul Anderson

Delenda Est (pp. 202-203)
Time Patrol

Truth , Thinking , Country

“For a space he faltered, when Goltan fell with a spear through him. “Now I am one friend poorer,” he said, “and that is a wealth not gained back.””

Poul Anderson book The Broken Sword

Source: The Broken Sword (1954), Chapter 10 (p. 65)

Wealth

“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.”

Poul Anderson

Death and the Knight (p. 752)
Time Patrol

Thinking

“Silence fell. The clock on my mantel ticked aloud and the wind outside flowed past like a river.”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 16 (p. 175)

Silence , Past

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

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 9 (p. 97)

Pleasure , Age

“The universe held as many surprises as it did stars. No, more. That was its glory. But someday one of them was bound to kill you.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 19 “Thule”, Section 32 (p. 517)

Universe , Star

“What’s the point of our living all these centuries if we haven’t grown up even a little?”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 19 “Thule”, Section 27 (p. 482)

“Before the spirit could seek into it, the mind must. She studied the tensor equations as once she studied the sutras, she meditated upon the koans of science, and at last she began to feel her oneness with all that was, and in the vision find peace.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 19 “Thule”, Section 18 (p. 449)

Science , Peace , Study , Feeling

“I don’t pretend to understand what the physicists mean by time, but for people, it isn’t so-and-so many measured units; it’s events, experiences. A man who crowds his life and dies young has lived longer than one who got old sitting in tame sameness.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 19 “Thule”, Section 14 (p. 441)

Life , Time , People , Understanding

“We Russians have learned to fear anarchy above all else. We would rather have tyranny than it. Hanno, you do wrong to look on people’s republics, strong governments of every kind, as always evil. Freedom is perhaps better, but chaos is worse.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 18 “Judgment Day”, Section 15 (p. 396)

Freedom , Strong , People , Learning

“Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ Yeah, trouble is, the three classes of people aren’t the same.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 18 “Judgment Day”, Section 3 (p. 336)

People

“Well, I’ll try to sketch it out for you, but I’ll have to repeat stuff I’ve told you before.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

“That’s all right. I’m a simon-pure layman. My basic thought habits were formed early in the Iron Age. Where it comes to science, I can use plenty of repetition.”
Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 18 “Judgment Day”, Section 3 (p. 331)

“It would annoy me less that we’re heading into a new puritanical era if the puritanism concerned itself about things that matter.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 18 “Judgment Day”, Section 3 (p. 330)

“No amount of money would stave off a nuclear warhead.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 18 “Judgment Day”, Section 3 (p. 328)

Money

“Once this was a free country. Oh, I always knew that couldn’t last, that here too things were bound to grind back to the norm—masters and serfs, whatever names they go by. And so far we continue happier than most of the world ever was. But damn, modern democracy has the technology to regiment us beyond anything Caesar, Torquemada, Suleyman, or Louis XIV dared dream of.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 18 “Judgment Day”, Section 3 (p. 327)

World , Dreams , Democracy , Country

“Well, everybody got stupid now and then, especially in war.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 17 “Steel” (p. 306)

War , Stupidity

“I seek occasional relief in old books. They help me tell the transient from the enduring.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 16 “Niche” (p. 291)

Books , Help

“Think. You have had your dealings with our bureaucracy. It is impossible not to, especially if one is a foreigner. Believe me, when we set our minds to it we can tangle, obstruct, and bring to a dead halt a herd of stampeding elephants.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 16 “Niche” (p. 291)

Thinking , Dead

“She seldom bothered taking revenge. Time did that for her, eventually.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 15 “Coming Together”, Section 2 (p. 281)

Time , Revenge

“I also know you cannot pick and choose. Change is a medicine bundle. You must refuse it altogether, or take the whole thing.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 12 “The Last Medicine” (p. 215)

Change

“Your Eminence is as great a man as I have ever met.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

“Then God have mercy on humankind,” Richelieu replied.
Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 11 “The Kitten and the Cardinal” (p. 207)

“You shall depart freely. Caution enjoins me to have you arrested and garroted within this hour. Either you are a charlatan and deserve it or a mortal danger and require it. However, I deem you a sensible man who will withdraw to his obscurity. And I am grateful to you for a fascinating glimpse of—what is best left alone.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 11 “The Kitten and the Cardinal” (p. 205)

“I have learned much in two thousand years, but nothing about any gods, except that they too, arise, change, age, and die. Whatever there is beyond the universe, if anything, I doubt it concerns itself with us.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 7 “The Same Kind”, Section 2 (p. 140)

God , Learning , Universe , Age