"Keep on thinking. Keep your thinking close to the ground, where it belongs. Don’t ever trade your liberty for another man’s offer to do your thinking and make your mistakes for you."

Poul Anderson Literature See all quotes by Poul Anderson →

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More by Poul Anderson

“Life isn’t a fairy tale; the knight who kills the dragon doesn’t necessarily get the princess. So what? Who’d want to live in a cosmos less rich and various than the real one?”

“Men, whose span is cruelly short, rush nonetheless to death in their youth as to a maiden’s arms.”

“On our Earth, we’ve perforce learned all the knavery there is to know.”

“It was lonely, not even knowing yourself.”

“Heim ignored the mob scene on the 3V, rested his eyes on the cold serenity of the Milky Way and thought that this, at least, would endure.”

“What’s the point of our living all these centuries if we haven’t grown up even a little?”

Resonant Thoughts

"You see the mountain, and hill following after hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchard, the fields of ripe corn, and the meadows reaching to the reed-beds by the river. You see me standin…"

— Arthur Machen

Literature1863–1947

#nature

"Until the world perceives that “good” cannot be applied to a thing because it is our own, and “bad” because it is another’s, there is no prospect of realizing community."

— Richard Weaver

Politics1575–1642

#society

"In the amusement arcades, he judged, some of the machines were older than he was. And some of his own angels, not the better ones, spoke of an ancient and deeply impacted drug culture, ground down int…"

— William Gibson

Literature1948–2008

#history

"After Pythagoras, Anaxagoras the Clazomenian succeeded, who undertook many things pertaining to geometry. And Oenopides the Chian, was somewhat junior to Anaxagoras, and whom Plato mentions in his Riv…"

— Proclus

Philosophy

#knowledge