The Compleat McAndrew

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

The mills of bureaucracy may or may not grind fine, but they certainly grind exceeding slow.

If I’ve learned one thing wandering around inside and outside the Solar System, it’s this: Nature has more ways of killing you than you can imagine. When you think you’ve learned them all, another one pops up to teach you humility—if you’re lucky. If not, someone else will have to decide what did you in.

Like many things in life, the problem I had been so sure I could solve proved more difficult than it sounded.

One thing you have to teach the young is that it’s wrong to run away from problems.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said huskily. “Nothing ever does before you understand it, and then it seems obvious.”

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.

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.

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

I think my inner voices are pretty good when it comes to warning of trouble. The problem is, I don’t always listen to them.

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.

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

And there you had it. Most people hate to learn that they are wrong. Not McAndrew. When he’s proved wrong, he’s ecstatic. It means he’s learned something new, and that’s his main reason for existence.

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