Charles Sheffield

Although the schoolchildren of this country emerge from our institutions of supposed learning ninety percent illiterate, knowing nothing of science, nothing of technology, little geography, and less history, every one of them will tell you who rules the country. We are governed by the interaction of a President, learned judges, and our people’s representatives.

Every child knows this; and every child is wrong. Perhaps it was once that way, but today the Court and President and Congress are either members of the old and wealthiest families, like the Michelsons and Brooks; or they have been bought and controlled by them. The sprawl of government passes and implements policies. But far fewer people, about a hundred in number, set policies.

In any civilized society, it is the individual or group who creates a problem that must have responsibility for solving it.

It was the classic question; you had two tasks to perform and one promised to be much harder and more unpleasant than the other. Did you tackle the tough one first and get it out of the way? Or did you postpone, and hope that before you came to the hard part you might be struck by a meteorite, or that a solar flare would wipe out life in the solar system?

When a person was so consistently wrong, it was time to give up having opinions.

We both know that actions taken from internal conviction are far better motivated than any external commands.

I learned a long time ago that it’s a bad habit to waste effort counting your friends. It’s your enemies you need to look out for.

Intelligence is too subtle an attribute to be inferred from appearance.

His mind was as furiously active as his hormones.

Happy endings were for children’s stories and fool. You live in misery, and then you die. Life, by definition, was not designed to end happily.

Louis continued aft. No happy ending, then. That was a fact, certain as death itself. He was living at the moment in a dream, an imagined world where everything went right.

But—dreams are real while they last. Could you say more of life?

A dream sequence was no more than a happy interlude, but maybe a happy interlude could last for an awful long time.

Nothing in life produce a more powerful joy than a near miss by the Angel of Death.

In the old words of wisdom, you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, and that’s usually enough to get by.

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