Top 60 Poul Anderson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Poul Anderson

2. “A fanatic is a man who, when he’s lost sight of his purpose, redoubles his effort.”

— Poul Anderson

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

— Poul Anderson

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

— Poul Anderson

5. “We live with our archetypes, but can we live in them?”

— Poul Anderson

6. “The fish that first ventured ashore had considerable practical problems.”

— Poul Anderson

7. “My knowledge of the human psyche is as yet imperfect. Certain areas won’t yield to computation.”

— Poul Anderson

8. “Timidity can be as dangerous as rashness.”

— Poul Anderson

9. “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.”

— Poul Anderson

10. “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.”

— Poul Anderson

11. “This business of Chaos versus Law, for example, turned out to be more than religious dogma. It was a practical fact of existence, here.”

— Poul Anderson

12. “Our species is gifted where it comes to interpreting doctrine so as to justify whatever one wants to do.”

— Poul Anderson

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

— Poul Anderson

14. “How much of what we dismiss today may have been based on fragmentary observation, centuries ago, before the very existence of a scientific framework began to condition what facts we would and would not discover?”

— Poul Anderson

15. “Will none wipe the sneer of the face of the cosmos?”

— Poul Anderson

16. “Why do most people think their own impoverished lives must be the norm of the universe?”

— Poul Anderson

17. “Heaven is not as narrowly literal-minded as hell.”

— Poul Anderson

18. “Cynicism is boringly fashionable. I didn’t think you would be afraid to say mankind is worth fighting for.”

— Poul Anderson

19. “I’ll have to jump around like sodium in the rain.”

— Poul Anderson

20. “What else is life but always bidding farewell?”

— Poul Anderson

21. “I must have first read The High Crusade in my early teens, and in memory, the book is fun, with the English villagers and nobles conquering the galaxy after they’ve taken over an alien space ship that landed in their village. The Baron, Sir Roger, merely intended to catch a quick ride to the wars in France, then go on to the Crusades in Jerusalem, but one thing led to another.”

— Poul Anderson

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

— Poul Anderson

23. “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.”

— Poul Anderson

24. “A man can do but little. Enough if that little be right.”

— Poul Anderson

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

— Poul Anderson

26. “In Harvest of Stars, there is this notion, not original with me of course, that it will become possible to download at least the basic aspects of a human personality into a machine program.”

— Poul Anderson

27. “Cuando la vida se pierde, solo queda, para vosotros y vuestros hijos, lo que de vosotros se dice.”

— Poul Anderson

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

— Poul Anderson

29. “You’re right,’ I’d say. ‘The planet is grossly overpopulated and we’d better do something about it. Do you want to machine-gun the surplus yourself, or shall we start with you?”

— Poul Anderson

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

— Poul Anderson

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

— Poul Anderson

32. “The same fight was being waged, here the Nazis and there the Middle World; but in both places, Chaos against Law, something old and wild and blind at war with man and the works of man.”

— Poul Anderson

33. “Poul is gone, now, more’s the pity – he was a neighbor of mine out here in California, and a friend for more than forty years – but his books live on, and I’m happy to see his lovely High Crusade coming into a new incarnation now. – Robert Silverberg, April 2010.”

— Poul Anderson

34. “Anybody can find infinite Mandelbrot figures in his navel.”

— Poul Anderson

35. “A fanatic’s willingness to kill or be killed in the service of a cause cannot prove the rightness of that cause.”

— Poul Anderson

36. “Two lives met across death and centuries. To ask what it meant is meaningless. There is no destiny. But sometimes there is bravery.”

— Poul Anderson

37. “Our own age is not one which can afford to call its ancestors savage.”

— Poul Anderson

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

— Poul Anderson

39. “You know what they say about bold spacemen never becoming old spacemen.”

— Poul Anderson

40. “Who can we trust with a monopoly of the planet killer weapons and unlimited powers of inspection and arrest? Why, a country big and modern enough to make peace-keeping a major industry; but not big enough to conquer anyone else or force its will on anyone without the support of a majority of nations; and reasonably well thought of by everyone. In short, Sweden.”

— Poul Anderson

41. “If nothing else, we today need a reminder that we must never take civilization for granted. I.”

— Poul Anderson

42. “I’m only certain that nothing is forever. No matter how carefully you design a system, it will go bad and die.”

— Poul Anderson

43. “Ill is it when good folk die.’ ‘Why, if they were good you need not mourn for them,’ said Skafloc glibly, ’for they are safe from this world’s sorrows, come home to Him above. I should think, in truth, that only the sound of your weeping could trouble their bliss.”

— Poul Anderson

44. “Momentarily a wing of zodiacal radiance could be seen, like a halo over the rising fire-disk.”

— Poul Anderson

45. “Give me leave, lord, and I will be the best of your hounds – but if a dog be driven out, he will become a wolf and feed on his master’s flocks.”

— Poul Anderson

46. “I am told that our chroniclers’ practice of inventing speeches for great persons whose lives they write is unscholarly.”

— Poul Anderson

47. “What had he been fighting when he fought the Nazis but a resurgence of archaic horrors that civilized men had once believed were safely dead? In.”

— Poul Anderson

48. “Happier are all men than the beings of faerie – or the gods, for that matter,’ he said. ‘Better a life like a falling star, brief and bright across the dark, than the long, long waiting of the immortals, loveless and cheerlessly wise.”

— Poul Anderson

49. “There is naught on which it does not bite, nor does it ever grow dull of edge. Venom is in the steel, and the wounds it gives cannot be healed by leechcraft or magic or prayer. Yet this is the curse on it: that every time it is drawn it must drink blood, and that in the end, somehow, it brings the bane of him who uses it’.”

— Poul Anderson

50. “I’ll often fail; but never willingly.”

— Poul Anderson