Charles Sheffield

"Maybe Redman meant well when he set up the church, but you can never create a good society based on deception. It’s been tried before, and it always fails. The trouble is, people won’t learn from history."

"The trouble with apocalyptic visions is that they often won’t withstand a rational examination."

"Alexandria may indeed be full of Devils, Lord, but they behaved very like merchants to my eyes."

"Irresponsible on my part, to put pleasure before professional work? Sure—but as I get older carpe diem gets more and more reasonable as a motto for life."

"Telepathy? It’s bunk, Tolly. Now, if you’d asked me that forty years ago, I’d have said it was the most exciting thing in the world. Back when Rhine started his work, I thought there was really something there. Since then, it’s gone nowhere. Christ, there’s been any amount of talk, lots of horseshit, no real evidence, and nothing for progress. So now, I say it’s bunk—or else we’ve been going about it all wrong."

"Do you see what I mean about evolution? Waldo exhibited none of the usual survival traits. Oh, well, perhaps a certain blind persistence. But as usual, he landed on his feet. He always does. It convinces me to the main genetic selection criterion these days is not skill, intelligence, or any of the usual virtues. It’s entertainment value. Have that, and everything else will come to you."

"When you pay somebody off, it only increases their demands. I know, only too well. They are never satisfied with what they get."

"Not one word of what I’d said had got through to him. It didn’t much matter, I’d really been speaking for the media anyway, but it was a shame to see bigotry masquerading as public-spirited behavior."

"There was one good argument against cloning, and only one. It increased the total number of people, and to me that number already felt far too large."

"The superior strain of peas is the one whose genetic composition allows it to adapt to whatever environment it is presented with. People are not peas, but in one respect they are not very different from them: some have superior genetic composition to others."

"I worry when I hear talk of “this many millions” and “that many billions” from officials who I know have trouble calculating a restaurant tip."

"Everyone agreed what an interesting concept it was—the sort of thing that ought to be true, in an interesting world."

"Luck is infatuated with the efficient."

"Everyone was somebody’s cousin, or uncle, or bedmate, or best college friend. Sometimes he felt that the whole of Washington was glued together into one vast, incestuous, and inefficient snotball."

"As the poet laureate of all confidence tricksters and treasure-seekers puts it, we were “given to strong delusion, wholly believing a lie.”"

"There is nothing more alien to a modern American than yesterday’s empires, with their arbitrary imperial powers, their cruelty, and their casual control over life and death."

"Humans harnessed a negligible fraction of tidal energy, although the available energy is huge. Other species do rather better, and the intertidal zones are the most biologically productive regions of the world, more so than even the tropical rainforests."

"It is very clear that nothing in nature presents such a danger to the human race is our own actions."

"I sometimes think that the only thing in life that I find truly irresistible is the challenge to finagle something that everyone else says can’t be done."

"“Any great thoughts?”… “The younger generation are clearly unfitted to run the world, but one day they are going to do it anyway.”"

"Unfair to other students? Probably. I was not going to worry about that. Show me a totally impartial teacher, and I’ll show you a robot."

"But maybe we wrongly define the higher human functions. How we think and feel about everything except questions of pure logic is decided maybe five percent in our brains, ninety-five percent in our glands. And how many events in human history have been the result of logical thought? Just try to name one."

"The possible future is not just longer than the past. It is unimaginably longer."

"The more foolproof you think something is, the worse the failure when it happens."

"“Captain Roker, I don’t like your insinuation,” he said. “McAndrew is a physicist—so am I. You may not be smart enough to realize it, but physics is a field of study, not a surgical operation. Castration isn’t part of the Ph.D. Exams, you know.”"

"As usual he looked tired, but that was normal. Geniuses worked harder than anyone else, not less hard."

"The first space colonies had been conceived as utopias, planned by Earth idealists who wouldn’t learn from history. New frontiers may attract visionaries, but more than that they attract oddities. Anyone who is more than three sigma away from the norm, in any direction, seems to finish out there on the frontier. No surprise in that. If a person can’t fit, for whatever reason, he’ll move away from the main group of humanity. They’ll push him, and he’ll want to go."

"We got the way we are, Jeanie, because life on Earth is one long fight for limited resources. Our bloody-mindedness all started out as food battles, three billion years ago."

"The first ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang is far more interesting that the entire rest of the history of the universe."

"You just can’t tell. Brains won’t correlate with appearance."

"It’s no surprise that there are people like Anna Griss in the world. There always have been. Go back fifty thousand years, to a time when most of us were just grubbing along, looking for a decent bush of ripe berries or a fresher lump of meat. A few, like McAndrew, were busy inventing language or numbers, or painting the walls of the cave. And some, just a handful but too many in every generation, were seeking an edge over the rest of us: Water access, or mating rules, or restricted entry to heaven. No matter how few they were, Anna Griss would have been one of them."

"And there you had it. Most people hate to learn that they are wrong. Not McAndrew. When he’s proved wrong, he’s ecstatic. It means he’s learned something new, and that’s his main reason for existence."

"I think my inner voices are pretty good when it comes to warning of trouble. The problem is, I don’t always listen to them."

"The laws of probability not only permit coincidences; they absolutely insist on them."

"The mills of bureaucracy may or may not grind fine, but they certainly grind exceeding slow."

"If I’ve learned one thing wandering around inside and outside the Solar System, it’s this: Nature has more ways of killing you than you can imagine. When you think you’ve learned them all, another one pops up to teach you humility—if you’re lucky. If not, someone else will have to decide what did you in."

"“It doesn’t make sense,” he said huskily. “Nothing ever does before you understand it, and then it seems obvious.”"

"That’s the trouble with the younger generation. They don’t understand why a thing can’t be done, so they go ahead and do it."

"One thing you have to teach the young is that it’s wrong to run away from problems."

"Like many things in life, the problem I had been so sure I could solve proved more difficult than it sounded."

"The Asteroid Belt contains everything from substantial bodies like Ceres, seven hundred and fifty kilometers across, all the way down to house-sized boulders, pebbles, and grains of sand. One good rule of thumb is that for every object of a given size, there will be ten times as many one-third that size."

"It is remarkable that observation of the faint agglomerations of stars known as galaxies leads us, very directly and cleanly, to the conclusion that we live in a Universe of finite and determinable age. A century ago, no one could have offered even an approximate age for the Universe. For an upper bound, most nonreligious scientists would probably have said “forever.” For a lower bound, all they had was the age of the Earth."

"“I wonder why somebody would go to all that trouble to make a complete fool of himself.” “Come on, Gina, we both know why.” “Oh, I guess you’re right. Money will always do it.” Of course."

"It’s the usual sensation mongering; the news services will say anything for an effect."

"The ship climbed steadily and laboriously up, away from the plane of the ecliptic. Finally, the parallax was sufficient to move the planets from their usual apparent positions. Mars, Earth, Venus, and Jupiter all sat in constellations that were no part of the familiar zodiac. Mercury was cowering close to the sun. Saturn alone, swinging out at the far end of her orbit, seemed right as seen from the ship. Bey Wolf, picking out their positions through a viewport, wondered idly how the astrologers would cope with such a situation. Mars seemed to be in the House of Andromeda, and Venus in the House of Cygnus. It would take an unusually talented practitioner to interpret those relationships and cast a horoscope for the success of this enterprise."

"“I think I’ll have a sign made for that far wall,” said Bey at last. “Indeed?” “Yes. It will say, ‘If you have nothing to do, please don’t do it here’.”"

"“Hormones are everything, Turpin,” she said to the bird on her shoulder. “Brains are nice, and looks are nice, and logic’s even nicer; but hormones run the show. For everyone, even for me and you.”"

"War was senseless. And yet war came creeping steadily closer."

"They saw every event through the distorting lens of their own paranoia."

"Life’s not chess, and life’s not poker, but there’s some of both in it."