10 quotes
When facts are insufficient, theorizing is ridiculous at best, misleading at worst.
The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)
Mystery is in a way the guarantee of the boundlessness of the might of the ruler: power bound to reason must always have limitations, great though it may be.
The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)
You can’t be a telepath and remain any kind of prude. People’s lives were their own business, if they didn’t hurt anyone else too badly.
The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)
Anderson demonstrates that if one accepts a sham mystery as real, one has stopped or strayed in the search for truth, and truth has survival value.
The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)
One can surrender one’s rational will to beliefs or habits as easily as to individuals, for essentially the same reasons, and with essentially the same results. Ideas have a mystery and power of their own.
The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)
Iskilip is senile, more than half converted to his own artificial creed. He was mumbling about prophecies Val Nira made long ago, true prophecies. Bah! Tricks of memory and wishfulness.
The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)
So why was a civilian going armed? It bespoke a degree of lawlessness that fitted ill with a technological society.
The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)
One light-year is not much as galactic distances go. You could walk it in about 270 million years, beginning at the middle of the Permian Era, when dinosaurs belonged to the remote future, and continuing to the present day.
The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)
Freedom brings responsibility and often guilt. It may indeed provide a deeper satisfaction and a richer life, but the evaluation of such rewards is a distressingly subjective process. Perhaps no argument in favor of liberty can satisfy the intellect; perhaps the best we can hope for is a shared emotional conviction.
The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)
No, the only way to sanity—to survival—is to abandon class prejudice and race hate altogether, and work as individuals. We’re all...well, Earthlings, and subclassification is deadly. We all have to live together, and might as well make the best of it.
The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)