Poul Anderson

Quotes

1. The end of the world—was the sky going to open up, would the angels pour down the vials of wrath on a shaking land, and would God appear to judge the sons of men? He listened for the noise of great galloping hoofs, but there was only the wind in the trees.

   That was the worst of it. The sky didn’t care. The Earth went on turning through an endlessness of dark and silence, and what happened in the thin scum seething over its crust didn’t matter.

   p. 40

2. 

   The city was breaking state and national laws every day—it had to—and the governor was outraged. He wanted to bring the whole state back under his own authority. It wasn’t an unreasonable wish, but the times weren’t ripe; and when they eventually were, the old forms of government would be no more important than the difference between Homoousian and Homoiousian. But it was going to take a lot of argument to convince the Albany man of that.

   p. 76

3. 

   “You have to have some kind of morality,” he said.

   “Sure. Like you have to have motives for doing anything at all. Still, I think we’re beyond that smug sort of code which proclaimed crusades and burned heretics and threw dissenters into concentration camps. We need more personal and less public honor.”

   p. 152

4. 

   And ninety-nine percent of the human race, no matter how smart they are, will do the convenient thing instead of the wise thing, and kid themselves into thinking they can somehow escape the consequences. We’re just built that way.

   p. 28

5. 

   “Peace,” he added, “is kept by the good will and strength of the peaceful.”

   p. 160

6. 

   What was right? A man should live justly—but too often it was hard to say which was the road of justice. At any rate, this war was not a struggle of evil against good, black against white; it was a fight between many human beings, none of whom was wholly bad or wholly good.

   p. 99

7. 

   A little careful pushing, and they’ll bury the hatchet all right—in each other.

   p. 76

8. 

   “I wonder if there are any gods at all—if they aren’t just another story.”

   Tom and Owl shrank from him. But no lightning struck.

   p. 78

9. 

   Too far a retreat from reality is insanity.

   p. 82

10. 

    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.

    p. 25

11. 

    There was a huge sadness in it—the little men of today, gnawing apart the mighty works they no longer understood. In a few hundred years, or a few thousand, what did it matter? Nothing would be left, nothing but rubble and waving grass and the wild dogs howling where men had once lived.

    p. 20

12. 

    His will grew tight again. This was no age for weaklings. You had to do whatever seemed best, without letting gods or men or the lower devils deter you.

    p. 125