Poul Anderson Quotes

I think the first duty of all art, including fiction of any kind, is to entertain. That is to say, to hold interest. No matter how worthy the message of something, if it's dull, you're just not communicating.

There are some ideas so stupid that only intellectuals can believe in them, particularly left-wing intellectuals.

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

The single definition of government I've ever seen that makes sense is that it's the organization which claims the right to kill people who won't do what it wants.

A fanatic is a man who, when he's lost sight of his purpose, redoubles his effort.

Timidity can be as dangerous as rashness.

A man isn't really alive till he has something bigger than himself and his own little happiness, for which he'd gladly die.

Give fear no hold on you. Keep sinews loose and senses open, ready at every instant to flow with the rush of action.

Let us settle down to the serious business of getting drunk.

Machines can only find what ignorant men have programmed them to find.

The fish that first ventured ashore had considerable practical problems.

He had seen too much of the cosmos to have any great faith in man's ability to understand it.

Why do people in this age think their own impoverished lives must be the norm of the universe?

We live with our archetypes, but can we live in them?

So much American science fiction is parochial - not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same ideals, the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier technology. Well, you know darn well it doesn't work that way.

Colonization means potential immortality for the human genus. Man's safety on Earth was never great, and it dwindles hourly. Disarmament, even world government, will not guarantee survival in an age when population presses natural resources to the limit and when the knowledge of how to work mischief on a planetary scale is ever more widely diffused among peoples who may grow ever more desperate.

In my considered opinion, the profit to be made by permanent settlement in space is nothing less than the survival of industrial civilization, and therefore the survival of nearly the entire human race, along with such amenities as peace, freedom, enough to eat, and the chance to reach a high age in good health.

Happier are all men than the dwellers in Faerie – or the gods, for that matter…Better a life like a falling star, bright across the dark, than a deathlessness that can see naught above or beyond itself…the day draws nigh when Faerie shall fade, the Erlking himself shrink to a woodland sprite and then to nothing, and the gods go under. And the worst of it is, I cannot believe it wrong that the immortals will not live forever.

Better a life like a falling star, brief bright across the dark, than the long, long waiting of the immortals, loveless and cheerlessly wise.

These lands are not always calm. We may well have more adventures ahead of us. But we shall meet them with high hearts.

If we knew exactly what to expect throughout the Solar System, we would have no reason to explore it.

Heaven is not as narrowly literal-minded as hell.

At each stage...entirely new laws, concepts and generalizations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one.

Anybody can find infinite Mandelbrot figures in his navel.

What five books would I like to be remembered for? Well... Tau Zero, I like that one especially. It was somewhat of a tour de force, and I think it got across what I was trying for.