Charles Sheffield Quotes

The first space colonies had been conceived as utopias, planned by Earth idealists who wouldn’t learn from history. New frontiers may attract visionaries, but more than that they attract oddities. Anyone who is more than three sigma away from the norm, in any direction, seems to finish out there on the frontier. No surprise in that. If a person can’t fit, for whatever reason, he’ll move away from the main group of humanity. They’ll push him, and he’ll want to go.

As usual he looked tired, but that was normal. Geniuses worked harder than anyone else, not less hard.

Captain Roker, I don't like your insinuation," he said. "McAndrew is a physicist—so am I. You may not be smart enough to realize it, but physics is a field of study, not a surgical operation. Castration isn't part of the Ph.D. Exams, you know.

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

The possible future is not just longer than the past. It is unimaginably longer.

But maybe we wrongly define the higher human functions. How we think and feel about everything except questions of pure logic is decided maybe five percent in our brains, ninety-five percent in our glands. And how many events in human history have been the result of logical thought? Just try to name one.

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.

I sometimes think that the only thing in life that I find truly irresistible is the challenge to finagle something that everyone else says can’t be done.

It is very clear that nothing in nature presents such a danger to the human race is our own actions.

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.

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.

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

Everyone was somebody’s cousin, or uncle, or bedmate, or best college friend. Sometimes he felt that the whole of Washington was glued together into one vast, incestuous, and inefficient snotball.

Luck is infatuated with the efficient.

Everyone agreed what an interesting concept it was—the sort of thing that ought to be true, in an interesting world.