Mathematicians From England

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

"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 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."

"It is one of the unfortunate aspects of the legal profession that excess carries no penalty. There is never, for a lawyer, such a thing as too much."

"When you have something to do, do it. When you have nothing to do, sleep."

"As you will one day discover, a leader is not a leader because of the way that he or she behaves. He is a leader only because of the way that he is treated by others."

"Improbable as it seems, I think she admires you more than me."

"He was a professional trouble-shooter. That was a fancy name for an idiot."

"His mind was as furiously active as his hormones."

"Idle wishing for circumstances different from what you had was a waste of time."

"Happy endings were for children’s stories and fool. You live in misery, and then you die. Life, by definition, was not designed to end happily. Louis continued aft. No happy ending, then. That was a fact, certain as death itself. He was living at the moment in a dream, an imagined world where everything went right. But—dreams are real while they last. Could you say more of life? A dream sequence was no more than a happy interlude, but maybe a happy interlude could last for an awful long time."

"When you had little or no information, it was unreasonable to have any expectations. But somehow you did, even if they were often wrong."

"He realized a profound truth: there is no one so generous as a bureaucrat spending other people’s money."

"Didn’t anything scare the two aliens? Sometimes she wondered if humans were the only beings in the universe with a sense of cowardice (be charitable, and call it and instinct for self-preservation)."

"One form of insanity bears the name curiosity."

"His sin was something that scientists had done for thousands of years. Scientists didn’t usually change data, not unless they were outright charlatans. But when facts didn’t agree with theory, there was an awful temptation to find reasons for rejecting the offending data and and hanging on to the theory. Ptolemy had done it. Newton had done it. Darwin had done it. Einstein had done so explicitly."

"“How did you do that?” The Hymenopt inclined her head. “With respect, Professor Lang, great intellectual power, even at the level you possess it, is not always a substitute for humble practical experience.”"

"Trouble comes in a thousand different ways. Not usually anything you expect, either. That’s why it’s trouble."

"Logic was good, but too much logical analysis inhibited action. Darya had heard it seriously suggested that the original human cladeworld, Earth, had degenerated to an ineffectual backwater of a planet because computer trade-off analysis had increasingly been used as the basis for decision making. On purely logical grounds, no one would ever explore, invent, rejoice, sing, strive, fall in love, or take physical and psychological risks of any kind. Better to stay in bed in the morning; it was much safer."

"Hans Rebka sat on a rounded pyramid never designed for contact with the human posterior, and thought about luck. There was good luck, which mostly happened to other people. And there was bad luck, which usually happened to you. Sometimes, through observation, guile, and hard work, you could avoid bad luck—even make it look like good luck, to others. But you would know the difference, even if no one else did. Well, suppose that for a change good luck came your way. How should you greet that stranger to your house? You could argue that its arrival was inevitable, that the laws of probability insisted that good and bad must average out over long enough times and large enough samples. Then you could welcome luck in, and feel pleased that your turn had come round at last. Or you could hear what Hans Rebka was hearing: the small, still voice breathing in his ear, telling him that this good luck was an impostor, not to be trusted."

"Darya had a few moments of wild hope before logic intruded."

"“We’re all here,” said Louis Nenda’s voice. “Where’s here? Can you see?” “Not a thing. Black as a politician’s heart.”"

"Kallik’s explanation was neat, logical, and complete. Like most such explanations, it was, in Hans Rebka’s view, almost certainly wrong. That was not the way the real world operated."

"What I found was worse than diversity—it was insanity."

"“To a logical entity, such as myself, the behavior of organic intelligences such as yourself, provides many anomalies. For example, the history of humanity, the species concerning which my data banks have most information, is replete with cases where humans, on little or no evidence, have believed in impossibilities. They have accepted the existence of a variety of improbable entities: of gods and demons, of fairies and elves, of ‘good luck’ charms, of magic potions, of curses and hexes and evil eyes.” “Tally, if you’re going to blather about—” “But at the same time, humans and other organic intelligences often seem unwilling to accept the implications and consequences of their own legitimate scientific theories.”"

"Are we perhaps guilty of temporal chauvinism, believing that our own time is uniquely important, as all generation tend to think that their time is of unique importance?"

"When a person was so consistently wrong, it was time to give up having opinions."

"If you win too easy, better ask what’s going on that you don’t know about."

"Darya found the logic of her thought processes so compelling that it never occurred to her that others might have a different reaction. But they did."

"But no one, no matter how intelligent, could make good inferences from bad data."

"Once you were committed to a course of action, you didn’t waste your time looking back and second-guessing the decision, because every action in life was taken on the basis of incomplete information. You looked at what you had, and you did all you could to improve the odds; but at some point you had to roll the dice—and live or die with whatever you had thrown."

"Old habits did not just die hard. They refused to die at all."

"The answers come pat and fast. You see, what the downsiders want isn’t an explanation; it’s a catchphrase they can use instead of an explanation."

"Darya was beginning to understand why she might be ruined forever for academic life. Certainly, the world of ideas had its own pleasures and thrills. But surely there was nothing to compete with the wonderful feeling of being alive, after knowing without a shadow of doubt that you would be dead in one second."

"Birdie cringed. If there was one thing worse than being a coward, it was being mistaken for a hero."

"Don’t confuse caution with cowardice."

"Theories were a dime a dozen. The partition that separated science and wishful thinking was evidence: observations and firm facts."

"Darya stood up, heard her voice rising, and knew she was doing what she insisted what a scientist should never do: allowing passion and the defense of personal theories to interfere with logical analysis."

"Nothing was more fascinating than information. It was infinite in quantity, or effectively so, limited only by the total entropy of the universe; it was vastly diverse and various; it was eternal; It was available for collection, anywhere and anytime. And, perhaps best of all, E. C. Tally thought with the largest amount of self-satisfaction that his circuits permitted, you never knew when it might come in useful."

"“Professor Lang’s important work, with all due respect, does not answer that question.” The knife, sliding in hidden behind the compliment. “With all due respect” meant “with no respect at all.”"

"Nothing in life produce a more powerful joy than a near miss by the Angel of Death."

"Arabella Lund had been full of “rules,” and one of her most basic was this: Anything in the universe can happen once, or at least it can seem to happen. If you want to obtain information, make it happen again."

"No purpose is served by making private suffering into a public event."

"It might be an impossible task, but at least it was a well-defined one. The rules for performance were no problem. He had learned them long ago on Teufel: you succeed, or you die trying. Until you succeed, you never relax. Until you die, you never give up."

"Human history extends for approximately ten thousand years before the Expansion, with written records available for roughly half that time. Unfortunately, the human tendency for self-delusion, self-aggrandizement, and baseless faith in human superiority over all other intelligent life-forms renders much of the written record unreliable. Serious research workers are advised to seek alternative primary data sources concerning humans. —From the Universal Species Catalog (Subclass: Sapients)"

"“We’re just too nosy, Commander,” he went on. “Most humans have their patience level set a little too low, and their curiosity a bit too high.”"

"Be an optimist! It’s the only way to live."

"We are creatures of conditioning, Commander. We assume that what we know is easy, and we find mysterious whatever we do not."

"Human culture is built around four basic elements: sexual relationships, territorial rights, individual intellectual dominance, and desire for group acceptance. The H’Sirin model using just these four traits as independent variables enables accurate prediction of human behavior patterns. On the basis of this, human culture is judged to be of Level Two, with few prospects for advancement to a higher level. —From the Universal Species Catalog (Subclass: Sapients)"

"The partners were there; gravity was calling the changes, and the cosmic dance was ready to begin."