Talk:John W. Campbell

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 * Never accept the initial premise of the opposition.


 * Pioneering basically consists of finding new and more horrible ways to die.


 * We presuppose two things: that there is yet to be learned infinitely more than is now known, and that man can learn it.


 * When I write, I write only my own stories. As editor, I write the stories that a hundred people write.
 * Said to Isaac Asimov


 * You can't do just one thing.
 * Sometimes described as "Campbell's Law of Everything" or "Campbell's Law of Interrelatedness"

Did Campbell really say it? Signs point to no.
I tried to track down the exact issue of Analog magazine where John W. Campbell supposedly said "History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells "Can't you remember anything I told you?" and lets fly with a club." A previous poster's comment said they'd found it in a google books search, so I went to Google Books and searched and found two occurrences of the quote. One was from a book written in 2017, which quoted the phrase and claimed that Campbell had said it in Analog in 1965, without an issue number. The other was a snippet view from a 1967 issue of Analog, where it appeared to be inside a reader's letter to the editor.

I found the 1967 issue, the August issue, on a site that has PDF files of all the issues (page images only, so not searchable, alas) and indeed, reader Cleo Hindman from Ohio said "There's a grim-funny quote from somewhere:" and then quoted the exact phrase as given. Campbell's response was "Love that quote!" I suppose it's possible that Hindman was actually quoting one of Campbell's previous writings, possibly in 1965 as the 2017 book claimed, but I skimmed through all Campbell's 1965 editorials without finding it. Someone with more patience than I can read through all those editorials to see if he did drop that phrase somewhere, or do an OCR scan of all the pages to make them searchable, or contact the authors of the 2017 book to see if they can provide the exact issue number, but at this point it appears to me that Campbell didn't actually say it. CWesling (talk) 22:36, 19 July 2024 (UTC)