Charles Sheffield Quotes

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

The laws of probability not only permit coincidences; they absolutely insist on them.

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.

When you got right down to it, every important decision in life was made with inadequate information.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Lop the top-end tail off the distribution of human intelligence and creativity," he went on, "and it would make no measurable difference to the population. Only one person in a billion is out beyond the six-sigma level. That's what we're talking about here. But eventually those one-in-a-billion make a huge difference. Ninety-five percent of all human progress comes from less than one thousandth of one percent of the population.

Not one word of what I’d said had got through to him. It didn’t much matter, I’d really been speaking for the media anyway, but it was a shame to see bigotry masquerading as public-spirited behavior.

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.

Unfair to other students? Probably. I was not going to worry about that. Show me a totally impartial teacher, and I’ll show you a robot.

A thousand friends have less weight than a single enemy.