Frases de Frederik Pohl

“Me habían vuelto a pagar y mi deuda había aumentado en ocho dólares. Me atormentaba a mí mismo preguntándome adónde iba a parar ese dinero, aunque yo lo sabía muy bien. Salía deshidratado del trabajo, como lo esperaba la compañía. Marcaba entonces mi combinación en la fuente y obtenía un chorro de Gaseosa; veinticinco centavos que volaban de mi sueldo. Como el chorro era escaso pedía otro; cincuenta centavos. La cena era insulsa, como siempre, y yo no podía pasar más de dos mordiscos de Gallina. En seguida sentía hambre y me iba a la cantina donde me daban a crédito algunas Crocantes. Las Crocantes me secaban la garganta y tenía que volver a la Gaseosa. Y la Gaseosa me daba ganas de comer. Comía otra Crocante… ¿Había pensado en todo esto Fowler Schocken cuando organizó Astromejor Verdadero, el primer trust esférico? ¿De la Gaseosa a las Crocantes, de las Crocantes a los Astro de los Astro a la Gaseosa?
Y el dinero adelantado se pagaba con un interés del seis por ciento.”

“Mi sentido de la iniciativa, la cualidad que me había llevado a ser lo que era, estaba agonizando poco a poco. Las dosis mínimas de alcaloides me paralizaban la voluntad, pero peor aún era esa sensación de impotencia y desesperanza. Pensaba ya que así era el mundo, que nunca cambiaría, que al fin y al cabo esto no era tan terrible, que uno siempre podía entrar en trance ante una hermosa pantalla o emborracharse con Gaseosa, o probar una de esas cápsulas verdes que pasaban de mano en mano con diversas consignas. Los muchachos esperarían con agrado el día de cobro.”

“Es extremadamente listo, considerando lo estúpido que es.”

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”

“They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever… and the other one scared me out of my mind.”

“Our representative government now is perhaps more representative than it has ever been before in history. It is not necessarily representative per capita, but it most surely is ad valorem. If you like philosophical problems. Here is one for you: should each human being’s vote register alike, as the lawbooks pretend and as some say the founders of our nation desired? Or should a vote be weighted according to the wisdom, the power, and the influence—that is, the money—of the voter?”

“Advertising reaches out to touch the fantasy part of people's lives. And you know, most people's fantasies are pretty sad.”

“Anyway, that's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die.”

“That’s power, Mitch, absolute power. And you know the old saying. Power ennobles. Absolute power ennobles absolutely.”

“Don Kayman was too good a scientist to confuse his hopes with observations. He would report what he found. But he knew what he wanted to find.”

“What will come of these things? That is a fair question. Unfortunately there is no answer. Not yet. If we knew the answer in advance, we would not have to perform the experiment.”

“Oh, it was work and no fooling. I enjoyed it very much, because I didn’t have to do it.”

“Even money, thought Roger on the way back to his own office, is not a bad bet. Of course, it depends on the stakes.”

“See, we don’t go in for your so-called ‘birth control’ here. No abortion. No contraception. We accept the gift of life when it is given. We believe that every human being, from the moment of conception on, has a right to a life—although,” he added, “not necessarily a long one.”

“When you spend weeks on end close to another person, so close that you know every hiccough, every smell and every scratch on the skin, you either come out of it hating each other or so deep in each other's gut that you can't find a way out. Klara and I were both. Our little love affair had turned into a Siamese-twin relationship. There wasn't any romance in it. There wasn't room enough between us for romance to occur. And yet I knew every inch of Klara, every pore, and every thought, far better than I'd known my own mother. And in the same way: from the womb out. I was surrounded by Klara.”

““You could rule the nation—and yet you don’t seem to go after that power.”
The mayor frowned. “Power, Mrs. O’Hare? You mean the chance to make laws and compel others to do what you want them to? Why, good heavens, Mrs. O’Hare, who in his right mind would want that?””

“There’s an editor for you.
They’re all the same. At first they’re all honey and sweet talk, with those long alcoholic lunches and blue-sky conversation about million-copy printings while they wheedle you into signing the contract. Then they turn nasty. They want the actual book delivered. When they don’t get it, or when the censors say they can’t print it, then there isn’t any more sweet talk and all the conversation is about how the aediles will escort you to debtors’ prison.”

“She described herself as happy. This diagnosis did not come from any welling up of joy inside herself. It came from the observed fact, looking at herself objectively, that whenever she decided she wanted something she always got it, and what other definition of happiness could there be?”

“Increase of population was always good news to us. More people, more sales. Decrease of IQ was always good news to us. Less brains, more sales.”

“Specialization is the goal of civilization.”

“I found a man who claimed he used to be a radio engineer. And if he was an engineer, I was Albert Einstein’s mother, but at least he knew which end of a soldering iron was hot.”

“You don’t think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell’s own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb.”

“It was an appeal to reason, and they’re always dangerous. You can’t trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it.”

“Is there any of me, or of any of us, that isn’t just consequence?
I think, and I’ve thought it over a lot, that everything that ever happened keeps on happening, extending tendrils of itself endlessly into the moving present tense of time, porducing its echoes, and explosions and extinctions forever.”

“Anybody who sets out to turn the world upside down has no right to complain if he gets caught in its gears.”

“Think of a frog as a functional machine designed to produce baby frogs. This is the Darwinian view, and is really what evolution is all about. In order to succeed, the frog has to stay alive long enough to grow up and get pregnant or get some female frog pregnant. That means it has to do two things. It has to eat. And it has to avoid being eaten.”

“I delighted his fussy little soul, because by adding what I remembered of Navy protocol to what he was able to teach me of Army routine, we came up with as snarled a mass of red tape as any field-grade officer in the whole history of all armed forces had been able to accumulate. Oh, I tell you, nobody sneezed in New York without a report being made out in triplicate, with eight endorsements.
Of course there wasn’t anybody to send them to, but that didn’t stop the Major. He said with determination: “Nobody’s ever going to chew me out for noncompliance with regulations—even if I have to invent the regulations myself!””

“There is no greater dark than the dark between the stars.”

“He drew himself up and said with dignity: “We administer justice, Mr. Courtenay. And an ancient, basic tenet of justice is: ‘Better that one thousand innocents suffer unjustly than one guilty person be permitted to escape.’””

“All of them had been so tested and retested that they had acquired considerable skill in answering test questions the way the examiners wanted them answered.”

“See, there’s a bit of a problem here. It’s true that editors are always begging for something new and different, but if you’re dumb enough to try to give it to them they don’t recognize it. When they ask for ‘different,’ what they mean is something right down the good old ‘different’ groove.”

“He said in an injured tone: “Mister, naturally the staff won’t bother your stuff. What kind of a hotel do you think this is?
“Of course, of course,” I said. But I knew he was lying, because I knew what kind of hotel it was. The staff was there only because being there gave them a chance to knock down more money than they could make any other way. What other kind of hotel was there?”