Charles Sheffield

A long time ago humans talked of terraforming Mars and Venus, but we never did it. Just too busy blowing ourselves up, I guess, ever to get round to it.

Sometimes wealth and power merely created the desire for more of the same.

I find that prayers don’t work when you need them most. Unless you answer them for yourself.

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

Many plans featured that old standby, prayer. Its historical record of effectiveness apparently discouraged few people, although I, regrettably, am among the skeptics. All the churches were full. It is not clear to me exactly what prayers were being offered by their occupants. The temporary suspension, perhaps, of the laws of physics? The art galleries and theaters also reported record crowds. If religion is an opiate, art is an anodyne.

The limits we assign to Nature sometimes define our own lack of imagination.

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

Decisions based on incomplete information are one thing, a fact of political life. Decisions made with no information are another.

His mind was as furiously active as his hormones.

The bad thing about being a world-class worrier was that being right was worse than being wrong.

Somehow he felt more resigned than surprised. Things had been going far too well for far too long. Just when you thought you had the universe by the tail, it turned round and bit you on the ass.

What purpose and will didn’t tell you, unfortunately, was how to do something that must be done.

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.

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.

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