Poul Anderson

Quotes

1. Nothing in excess, including self-denial.

   p. 29

2. 

   Then he decided that nothing was more impractical than misplaced practicality.

   p. 168

3. 

   “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.”

   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?

   p. 175

4. 

   Look, these were none of them supermen. In fact, they were either weaklings who’d been assigned civilian-type jobs, or warriors as ignorant and superstitious as brutal. Aside from what specialized training fitted them for Wallis’s purposes, he’d never tried to get them properly educated. If nothing else, that might have led to questioning of his righteousness and infallibility.

   p. 165

5. 

   Man’s duty in this life, he thought, is to choose the lesser evil.

   p. 67

6. 

   We can hardly expect conventional respectability of a person whose goal in life is enlightenment.

   p. 27

7. 

   What else is life but always bidding farewell?

   p. 21

8. 

   We, the proper civil government, approved your defense measures of the past several years, though you are aware that I myself always considered them excessive. When I think of the prosperity that tax money, those resources, could have brought, left in private hands—or the social good it could have done in the public sector— Give you military your heads, and you’d build bases in the fourth dimension to protect us against an invasion from the future.

   p. 49

9. 

   Your trouble is, the Old Faith reinforces every wish to kill that war has roused in you.

   p. 127

10. 

    That is forgotten, their wars and their deeds and their very speech. Wisdom lasts. It is what I have sought across the world.

    p. 102

11. 

    I heard too many answers, I met too many gods. Abroad they call on Christ, but if you fare southward long enough it is Muhammad; and eastward it is Gautama Buddha, save where they say the world is a dream of Brahm, or offer to a host of gods and ghosts and elves like ours in these Northlands. And almost every man I asked told me that his folk know the truth while the rest are benighted. Could I but hear a word I felt even half sure of—

    p. 103

12. 

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

    p. 106