Poul Anderson Quotes

I’ve yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you looked at it the right way didn’t become still more complicated.

Magic!' cried an old man. 'Tis sorcery, and we are undone!' 'Not so,' I told him, 'Sorcery cannot harm good Christians.' 'But I am a miserable sinner,' he wailed.

The fact is, man has never stayed by a single ideal. The mass enthusiasm when you were young gave way to cool, rationalistic classicism. Today that’s being drowned in turn by a kind of neoromanticism. God knows where that will lead. I probably won’t approve. Regardless, new generations grow up. We’ve no right to freeze them into our own mold. The universe is too wide.

Heaven is not as narrowly literal-minded as hell.

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...