Charles Sheffield

You just can’t tell. Brains won’t correlate with appearance.

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

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.

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

Are we perhaps guilty of temporal chauvinism, believing that our own time is uniquely important, as all generation tend to think that their time is of unique importance?

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.

TIG. Trust In Government. An old political principle, to give your organization a name that’s the opposite of what you mean.

That’s the trouble with the younger generation. They don’t understand why a thing can’t be done, so they go ahead and do it.

Birdie cringed. If there was one thing worse than being a coward, it was being mistaken for a hero.

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.

I've been testing Kallen's Law—my name for it, not his. Remember what he said? 'Anything that can be put into a data bank by one person can be taken out of it by another, if you're smart enough and have enough time.' That's one problem with a computer-based society, and one reason why computers were so tightly controlled on Pentecost: it's almost impossible to prevent access to computer-stored information.

His mind was as furiously active as his hormones.

Korin stared. It must be a novelty, finding someone more paranoid than he was.

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

Don’t confuse caution with cowardice.