Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 9 “Disease” (p. 136)
Source: Peace of Soul (1949), Ch. 6, p. 116
Letter to A.S. Suvorin (May 4, 1889)
Letters
“I've always been a very good judge of people. That's why I like so very few of them.”
Source: The Christmas Note
Reported in Eugene Gerhart, America's Advocate: Robert H. Jackson (1958), p. 289
De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: There are books that have devastated continents, destroyed thousands. What war hasn’t been a war of fiction? All the religious wars certainly, or the fiction of communism versus the fiction of capitalism – ideas, fictions, shit that people make. They have made a vast impression on the real world. It is the real world. Are thoughts not real? I believe it was Wittgenstein who said a thought is a real event in space and time. I don’t quite agree about the space and time bit, Ludwig, but certainly a real event. It’s only science that cannot consider thought as a real event, and science is not reality. It’s a map of reality, and not a very good one. It’s good, it’s useful, but it has its limits. We have to realise that the map has its edges. One thing that is past the edge is any personal experience. That is why magic is a broader map to me, it includes science. It’s the kind of map we need if we are to survive psychologically in the age that is to come, whatever that is. We need a bigger map because the old one is based on an old universe where not many of us live anymore. We have to understand what we are dealing with here because it is dangerous. It kills people. Art kills.
“I think God would not be the Almighty, the All-Wise, the All-Good, if he were the judge”
As quoted in Florence Nightingale's Theology: Collected Works of Florence Nightingale (2002) by Lynn McDonald, pps. 177-179 (Add Mss 45783 ff65-67)
Context: Perhaps it is not true to speak of God as a judge at all, or of his judgements. There does not seem to be really any evidence that His worlds are places of trial but rather schools, place of training, or that He is a judge but rather a Teacher, a Trainer, not in the imperfect sense in which men are teachers, but in the sense of His contriving and adapting His whole universe for one purpose of training every intelligent being to be perfect. … I think God would not be the Almighty, the All-Wise, the All-Good, if he were the judge, in the sense that the evangelical and Roman Catholic Christians impute judgement to him. … Our business is, I think, to understand, not to judge. What He does, as far as we know, to rule by law down to the most infinitesimally small portion of His universe, not to judge.
“In science… the ultimate judges are not experts but experiments.”
Source: Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987), Ch.13 Light as Lumps
How To Defend Society Against Science (1975)
“You were right. We should never have created science. It brought the twilight of the race.”
“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)
