Charles Sheffield

One form of insanity bears the name curiosity.

I’ll say only this: if we’re going to throw the idea of the Big Bang overboard, we won’t have much left of current astrophysics and cosmology.

He had written the man off completely, and now here came common sense and a talent for improvisation. Maybe you didn’t have to be an idiot just because you were rich.

Who should run the world? There’s no easy answer, no magic solution. There never is, to a really hard question.

Logic was good, but too much logical analysis inhibited action. Darya had heard it seriously suggested that the original human cladeworld, Earth, had degenerated to an ineffectual backwater of a planet because computer trade-off analysis had increasingly been used as the basis for decision making. On purely logical grounds, no one would ever explore, invent, rejoice, sing, strive, fall in love, or take physical and psychological risks of any kind. Better to stay in bed in the morning; it was much safer.

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

It was improbable for him to meet his old friends here? Fine, so it was improbable; but it had happened. “Improbable” was something you could only apply to future events.

Violence is never the only solution.

Never get involved in a venture with a man who inherited his money and didn’t earn any himself. He’ll assume he’s smarter than you are, just because he’s rich and you’re not, and he’ll expect you to bow down to his greatness because for all his life people have.

It had been designed for “peacekeeping,” which meant that it had been fitted out from stem to stern with the most hideous weapons of war that the human mind could conceive.

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

What I found was worse than diversity—it was insanity.