Charles Sheffield
155 quotes
Biography
Charles Sheffield, was an English-born mathematician, physicist, and science-fiction writer who served as a President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and of the American Astronautical Society.
"Remember, an easy question can have an easy answer. But a hard question must have a hard answer. And for the hardest questions of all, there may be no answer - except faith."
"Life’s not chess, and life’s not poker, but there’s some of both in it."
"Maybe Redman meant well when he set up the church, but you can never create a good society based on deception. It’s been tried before, and it always fails. The trouble is, people won’t learn from history."
"The trouble with apocalyptic visions is that they often won’t withstand a rational examination."
"Alexandria may indeed be full of Devils, Lord, but they behaved very like merchants to my eyes."
"Irresponsible on my part, to put pleasure before professional work? Sure—but as I get older carpe diem gets more and more reasonable as a motto for life."
"Telepathy? It’s bunk, Tolly. Now, if you’d asked me that forty years ago, I’d have said it was the most exciting thing in the world. Back when Rhine started his work, I thought there was really something there. Since then, it’s gone nowhere. Christ, there’s been any amount of talk, lots of horseshit, no real evidence, and nothing for progress. So now, I say it’s bunk—or else we’ve been going about it all wrong."
"Do you see what I mean about evolution? Waldo exhibited none of the usual survival traits. Oh, well, perhaps a certain blind persistence. But as usual, he landed on his feet. He always does. It convinces me to the main genetic selection criterion these days is not skill, intelligence, or any of the usual virtues. It’s entertainment value. Have that, and everything else will come to you."
"When you pay somebody off, it only increases their demands. I know, only too well. They are never satisfied with what they get."
"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."
"The superior strain of peas is the one whose genetic composition allows it to adapt to whatever environment it is presented with. People are not peas, but in one respect they are not very different from them: some have superior genetic composition to others."
"I worry when I hear talk of “this many millions” and “that many billions” from officials who I know have trouble calculating a restaurant tip."
"Everyone agreed what an interesting concept it was—the sort of thing that ought to be true, in an interesting world."
"As the poet laureate of all confidence tricksters and treasure-seekers puts it, we were “given to strong delusion, wholly believing a lie.”"
"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."
"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."
"It is very clear that nothing in nature presents such a danger to the human race is our own actions."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The more foolproof you think something is, the worse the failure when it happens."
"“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 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."
"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."
"The first ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang is far more interesting that the entire rest of the history of the universe."