Poul Anderson: Quotes about people

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

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 11 (p. 119)

People , Hope , Way , Nature

“Don’t get me wrong. These people are mine. I like and in many ways admire them. They’re the salt of the earth. It’s simply that I want other condiments too.”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 1 (p. 10)

People , Way

“Then they died.
And other men came after them. Wars flamed up and burned out; the howling peoples dwelt in smashed cities and kindled their fires with books.”

Poul Anderson book The Enemy Stars

Prologue (p. 1)
The Enemy Stars (1959)

Men , War , People , Books

“People usually take for granted that the way things are is the way things must be.”

Poul Anderson book The Enemy Stars

Foreward (p. v)
The Enemy Stars (1959)

People , Way

“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.””

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 11 (p. 124)

Death , People , Way , Hurt

“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 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

“Yeah. ‘Environment’ was very big for a while. Ecology Now stickers on the windshields of cars belonging to hairy young men—cars which dripped oil wherever they parked and took off in clouds of smoke thicker than your pipe can produce…Before long, the fashionable cause was something else, I forget what. Anyhow, that whole phase—the wave after wave of causes—passed away. People completely stopped caring…
I feel a moral certainty that a large part of the disaster grew from this particular country, the world’s most powerful, the vanguard country for things both good and ill…never really trying to meet the responsibilities of power.
We’ll make halfhearted attempts to stop some enemies in Asia, and because the attempts are halfhearted we’ll piss away human lives—on both sides—and treasure—to no purpose. Hoping to placate the implacable, we’ll estrange our last few friends. Men elected to national office will solemnly identify inflation with rising prices, which is like identifying red spots with the measles virus, and slap on wage and price controls, which is like papering the cracks in a house whose foundations are sliding away. So economic collapse brings international impotence…As for our foolish little attempts to balance what we drain from the environment against what we put back—well, I mentioned that car carrying the ecology sticker.
At first Americans will go on an orgy of guilt. Later they’ll feel inadequate. Finally they’ll turn apathetic. After all, they’ll be able to buy any anodyne, any pseudo-existence they want.”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 5 (pp. 53-54)

Men , People , World , Hope

“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

“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)

Business , Hurt , People