1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Poul Anderson

Poul Anderson Quotes
page 3

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 quotes0 likes

Poul Anderson Quotes

“He had intended to say that such was the nature of power. Seizing it and holding it were alike filthy.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 5 “No Man Shuns His Doom”, Section 1 (p. 106)

“Nothing in excess, including self-denial.”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 2 “The Peaches of Forever” (p. 29)

“What else is life but always bidding farewell?”

Poul Anderson book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 1 “Thule”, Section 8 (p. 21)

“Do you actually hope to convert the whole of mankind?”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

“Belay that! Anyhow, if you mean, Do we hope to make everybody into copies of us? The answer is, No. Mind, I’m not in Parliament or Admiralty, but I follow debates and I read the philosophers. One trouble with the old machine culture was that, by its nature, it did force people to become more and more alike. Not only did this fail in the end—disastrously—but to the extent it succeeded, it was a worse disaster.” Lohannaso smote the rail with a mighty fist. “Damnation, Thomas! We need all the diversity, all the assorted ways of living and looking and thinking, we can get!”
Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 11 (p. 119)

“Your son was in your own tradition.”

Poul Anderson book The Enemy Stars

“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.”
Source: The Enemy Stars (1959), Chapter 18 (p. 150)

“You can’t be a telepath and remain any kind of prude. People’s lives were their own business, if they didn’t hurt anyone else too badly.”

Poul Anderson

Journey’s End (p. 205)
Short fiction, The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)

“Iskilip is senile, more than half converted to his own artificial creed. He was mumbling about prophecies Val Nira made long ago, true prophecies. Bah! Tricks of memory and wishfulness.”

Poul Anderson book The Longest Voyage

The Longest Voyage (p. 171)
Short fiction, The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)

“Let’s stop making wild guesses and start gathering data.”

Poul Anderson

Epilogue (p. 122)
Short fiction, The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)

“Freedom brings responsibility and often guilt. It may indeed provide a deeper satisfaction and a richer life, but the evaluation of such rewards is a distressingly subjective process. Perhaps no argument in favor of liberty can satisfy the intellect; perhaps the best we can hope for is a shared emotional conviction.”

Poul Anderson

Patrick L. McGuire, Her Strong Enchantments Failing (p. 95)
Short fiction, The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)

“Anderson demonstrates that if one accepts a sham mystery as real, one has stopped or strayed in the search for truth, and truth has survival value.”

Poul Anderson

Patrick L. McGuire, Her Strong Enchantments Failing (p. 94)
Short fiction, The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)

“Mystery is in a way the guarantee of the boundlessness of the might of the ruler: power bound to reason must always have limitations, great though it may be.”

Poul Anderson

Patrick L. McGuire, Her Strong Enchantments Failing (p. 94)
Short fiction, The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)

“One can surrender one’s rational will to beliefs or habits as easily as to individuals, for essentially the same reasons, and with essentially the same results. Ideas have a mystery and power of their own.”

Poul Anderson

Patrick L. McGuire, Her Strong Enchantments Failing (p. 93; this work is an essay about Anderson's story The Queen of Air and Darkness).
Short fiction, The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)

“One light-year is not much as galactic distances go. You could walk it in about 270 million years, beginning at the middle of the Permian Era, when dinosaurs belonged to the remote future, and continuing to the present day.”

Poul Anderson book The Queen of Air and Darkness

The Queen of Air and Darkness (p. 43)
Short fiction, The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)

“You were right. We should never have created science. It brought the twilight of the race.”

Poul Anderson

“I never said that. The race brought its own destruction, through misuse of science. Our culture was scientific anyway, in all except its psychological basis. It’s up to us to take that last and hardest step. If we do, the race may yet survive.”
Tomorrow's Children (p. 34)
Short fiction, The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)

“No, the only way to sanity—to survival—is to abandon class prejudice and race hate altogether, and work as individuals. We’re all…well, Earthlings, and subclassification is deadly. We all have to live together, and might as well make the best of it.”

Poul Anderson

Tomorrow's Children (p. 30)
Short fiction, The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)

“It was true. Men died and civilization died, but before they died they lived. It was not altogether futile.”

Poul Anderson

Cold Victory, in Scithers &amp; Schweitzer (eds.) Another Round at the Spaceport Bar, p. 181. Originally appeared in Venture Science Fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_Science_Fiction, May 1957 <br class="br">Short fiction

“I was not speaking of minor ripples in the mainstream of history—certainly those are ruled by chance. But the broad current moves quite inexorably, I assure you.”

Poul Anderson

Cold Victory, in Scithers &amp; Schweitzer (eds.) Another Round at the Spaceport Bar, p. 181. Originally appeared in Venture Science Fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_Science_Fiction, May 1957 <br class="br">Short fiction

“Not that any simple principle exists, and not that I couldn’t be wrong. But it seems to me—well, that which we are, our society or culture or what you want to name it, has a life and a right of its own.”

Poul Anderson book The People of the Wind

He drew breath. “Best beloved,” he said, “if communities didn’t resist encroachments, they’d soon be swallowed by the biggest and greediest. Wouldn’t they? In the end, dead sameness. No challenges, no inspirations from somebody else’s way. What service is it to life if we let that happen?

Chapter 19 (p. 175)
The People of the Wind (1973)

“The best foundation that a decision is ever allowed is our fallible assessment of the probabilities.”

Poul Anderson book The People of the Wind

Source: The People of the Wind (1973), Chapter 17 (p. 161)