Poul Anderson Quotes

Technology determines the possibilities of society. It doesn't matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state.

This is no longer a battle of devices, it is a war of ecosystems.

I think we're all a party to this information all the time. It's every day, in a way we probably weren't a few years ago. We're more informed, which is a good thing because war is always there somewhere on the planet.

We might have new issues involving information technology for example, or new questions arising out of the war on terror, or new issues arising from natural disasters that can't be anticipated.

Compassion is a spiritual technology.

South Africa used to seem so far away. Then it came home to me. It began to signify the meaning of white hatred here. That was what the sheets and the suits and the ties covered up, not very well. That was what the cowardly guys calling me names from their speeding truck wanted to happen to me, to all of me: to my people. That was what would happen to me if I walked around the corner into the wrong neighborhood. That was Birmingham. That was Brooklyn. That was Reagan. That was the end of reason. South Africa was how I came to understand that I am not against war; I am against losing the war.

If we had these rockets in 1939, we should never have had this war.

The tone and tendency of liberalism...is to attack the institutions of the country under the name of reform and to make war on the manners and customs of the people under the pretext of progress.

Technology has been defined, perhaps a little ungenerously, as "a long Greek name for a bag of tools".

Education is, quite simply, peace-building by another name. It is the most effective form of defense spending there is.

And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man.

War isn’t declared in the name of God; it is a human affair entirely.

My war - and I have yet to win a decisive battle - is with the modes of thought that and conditioned feelings that prevail in psychology and therefore also in the way we think and feel about our being. Of these conditions none are more tyrannical than the convictions that clamp the mind and heart into positivistic science (geneticism and computerism), economics (bottom-line capitalism), and single-minded faith (fundamentalism).

We thought that the odds of things working OK were up in the upper 90 percent or we wouldn't have gone. But the - there were some problems cropped up on the flight but was able to take care of those OK and - although they were things that we hadn't really trained that much for. But it was the time of the Cold War and so there were was a lot of pressure on the - to get going and the Russians were claiming that they were - Soviets were claiming they were ahead of us in technology.

Many, who should know better, think that wars can be decided by soulless machines, rather than by the blood and anguish of brave men.

We must win the war on poverty by enlisting the greatest weapon ever invented - free enterprise

Unfortunately, religions have become a part of the problem instead of part of the solution. We have fought our wars in the name of God, questioning whose God is the best God and whose exploration of this deeper reality is the best explanation. That defies everything that this deeper reality teaches.

The Soviet Union was brought down by a strange global coalition of Western European conservatives, Eastern European nationalists, Russian liberals, Chinese communists, and Afghan Islamic reactionaries, to name only a few. Many of these discordant groups disliked the United States intensely. But Americans were able to mobilize them to direct their ire at the Soviet Union first.

The name of peace is sweet and the thing itself good, but between peace and slavery there is the greatest difference.

The kind of group mentality that we had lived under since the Second World War is starting to erupt, and the craving for individualism is now much stronger. It's not as taboo anymore, as it was when I was younger.

[Socialists claim] that we reject fraternity, solidarity, organization, and association; and they brand us with the name of individualists. We can assure them that what we repudiate is not natural organization, but forced organization. It is not free association, but the forms of association that they would impose upon us. It is not spontaneous fraternity, but legal fraternity. It is not providential solidarity, but artificial solidarity, which is only an unjust displacement of responsibility. Socialism . . . confounds Government and society.

A smart soldier wants to know the causes of wars. Also how to end them. After all, war is the normal state of affairs, isn't it? Peace is the name of the ideal we deduce from the fact that there have been interludes between wars.

They [the Soviets] preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth; they are the focus of evil in the modern world.

Governments, existing primarily to protect and enhance capitalism, maintain their power through the use of technologies that control the populace - by bread or circuses, by war or schooling, by armies and police, all of which are enabled and empowered by technology. That is what we might call the stick part of capitalism, while the riches-for-the-few is the carrot.

It troubles me that we are so easily pressured by purveyors of technology into permitting so-called "progress" to alter our lives without attempting to control it-as if technology were an irrepressible force of nature to which we must meekly submit.