Charles Sheffield

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

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.

It is not clear to me whether the insouciance of youth will be the doom of humanity or its salvation. I prefer to think the latter, but I have my doubts.

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

Luck is infatuated with the efficient.

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

I do not like to concatenate implausibilities.

Right decision or wrong decision, it was a leader’s job to make it.

That’s why we want it. Impossible gadgets are always the most valuable.

When in doubt, follow the money trail. People could lie, motives could be disguised, even acts could be misunderstood. Money was as constant as human nature.

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.

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.

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

Forrest Singer, it always seemed to Saul, spoke as though the two of them were equals. Saul possibly held the slightly inferior position in the doctor’s eyes. Saul was the President of the United States, true; but Forrest Singer was an M.D.

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.