Charles Sheffield

Don’t confuse caution with cowardice.

Richard Nixon was protected from impeachment, so long as Spiro Agnew was Vice President and would assume the presidency in Nixon’s place. Half of Washington knew that Agnew was a crook, and a boneheaded one at that. They had to get rid of Agnew before they could really go after Nixon.

They saw every event through the distorting lens of their own paranoia.

You pursue progress, even if you suspect that it is an illusion.

He realized a profound truth: there is no one so generous as a bureaucrat spending other people’s money.

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?

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

There is nothing more alien to a modern American than yesterday’s empires, with their arbitrary imperial powers, their cruelty, and their casual control over life and death.

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.

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.

When you pay somebody off, it only increases their demands. I know, only too well. They are never satisfied with what they get.

You crazy? You’ve got me confused with a guy who cares about other people.

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

Be an optimist! It’s the only way to live.

A thousand friends have less weight than a single enemy.