Charles Sheffield Quotes

That's a whole lot of ifs you got there."
"True. But which would you prefer, Louis Nenda?" Atvar H'sial rose from her crouched position. "A substantial set of contingent possibilities, or a single unpleasant certainty?

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

The universe is all extremes. Monstrous gravity fields, or next-to-nothing ones; extreme cold, or heat so intense that solids and liquids cannot exist; multimillion atmosphere pressures, or near-vacuum.
Ice or fire. Niflheim or Muspelheim: the ancient alternatives, imagined by humans long before the Expansion.
It’s planets that are the oddities; the strange neutral zone between suns and space, the thin interface where moderate temperatures and pressures and gravity fields can exist. And if planets are anomalies, then planets able to support life are rarer yet—a zero-measure subset in that set of strangeness.
And within that alien totality, where do humans fit?

Other people’s jobs always seemed easier than yours until you actually had to do them.

Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue.

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).

Data are not the same as information. Before you can get the answers you want, you have to ask the right question.

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.

It sounds reasonable to me."
"Reasonable, but not true. Big difference.

Mathematics is universal. But very little else is.

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

Engineers are dangerous because they’re obsessed by facts and you can’t divert them or buy them off.

When you have died once, you become most reluctant to do so again.

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.

Who should run the world? There’s no easy answer, no magic solution. There never is, to a really hard question.