Charles Sheffield Quotes

Don’t get caught again. Never, never, never. That was the Golden Rule, the only important rule.

It was the age-old conundrum: How do I know that the ‘me’ who wakes after a night’s sleep is the same ‘me’ who went to bed? I don’t. I merely employ it as a working assumption, for lack of anything better.

D'you know what homeostasis is?"
"I used to, before I rotted my brain with politics.

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

Science wasn’t a show-business talent, conducted in large halls and decided by audience applause.

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.

The leaders of the Legion of Argos were out-of-this-world mad. Rigid in outlook, intolerant of minor differences. In other centuries they would have led the Inquisition, tortured the heretics, burned the witches.

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.

If deadly violence were to be committed, he was like me. He would think it better to give than to receive.

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)

At stake with something more important than sex. At stake was life and death.

Intelligence is too subtle an attribute to be inferred from appearance.

And now I think about it, I never really wanted to live forever. I just want to live well.

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

Some of the Argos Group records are awful strange. If I had to guess, I’d say there’s fiddlin’ going on that don’t sound like violins.