Charles Sheffield

“Science wasn’t a show-business talent, conducted in large halls and decided by audience applause.”

““How did you do that?”The Hymenopt inclined her head. “With respect, Professor Lang, great intellectual power, even at the level you possess it, is not always a substitute for humble practical experience.””

“His sin was something that scientists had done for thousands of years. Scientists didn’t usually change data, not unless they were outright charlatans. But when facts didn’t agree with theory, there was an awful temptation to find reasons for rejecting the offending data and and hanging on to the theory. Ptolemy had done it. Newton had done it. Darwin had done it. Einstein had done so explicitly.”

“Trouble comes in a thousand different ways. Not usually anything you expect, either. That’s why it’s trouble.”

“Didn’t anything scare the two aliens? Sometimes she wondered if humans were the only beings in the universe with a sense of cowardice (be charitable, and call it and instinct for self-preservation).”

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

“One form of insanity bears the name curiosity.”

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

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

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

“Improbable as it seems, I think she admires you more than me.”

“His mind was as furiously active as his hormones.”

“Somehow he felt more resigned than surprised. Things had been going far too well for far too long. Just when you thought you had the universe by the tail, it turned round and bit you on the ass.”

“When you have something to do, do it. When you have nothing to do, sleep.”

“If you wanted to get yourself killed, there was no better way than to think you knew all the tricks. It took experience to make you realize that the universe could always pull another one out of the bag and throw it at you.”

“As you will one day discover, a leader is not a leader because of the way that he or she behaves. He is a leader only because of the way that he is treated by others.”

“Idle wishing for circumstances different from what you had was a waste of time.”

“When you had little or no information, it was unreasonable to have any expectations. But somehow you did, even if they were often wrong.”

“Arabella Lund had been full of “rules,” and one of her most basic was this: Anything in the universe can happen once, or at least it can seem to happen. If you want to obtain information, make it happen again.”

“You crazy? You’ve got me confused with a guy who cares about other people.”

““That’s a whole lot of ifs you got there.”“True. But which would you prefer, Louis Nenda?” Atvar H’sial rose from her crouched position. “A substantial set of contingent possibilities, or a single unpleasant certainty?””

“But humans had to learn to ignore appearance. No two beings who shared common thinking processes and common goals should be truly alien to each other.”

“But mere plausibility did not make the statement true.”

“Mathematics is universal. But very little else is.”

“Everyone was polite; no one was happy.”

“The partners were there; gravity was calling the changes, and the cosmic dance was ready to begin.”

“That’s what logic says. But I say, phooey, who wants logic? Not you, and not me. We want results.”

“What does one do when a madman suggests an appealing course of action? One worries—but probably goes along with it.”

“Be an optimist! It’s the only way to live.”

““We’re just too nosy, Commander,” he went on. “Most humans have their patience level set a little too low, and their curiosity a bit too high.””

“We are creatures of conditioning, Commander. We assume that what we know is easy, and we find mysterious whatever we do not.”

“It might be an impossible task, but at least it was a well-defined one. The rules for performance were no problem. He had learned them long ago on Teufel: you succeed, or you die trying. Until you succeed, you never relax. Until you die, you never give up.”

“No purpose is served by making private suffering into a public event.”

“Human culture is built around four basic elements: sexual relationships, territorial rights, individual intellectual dominance, and desire for group acceptance. The H’Sirin model using just these four traits as independent variables enables accurate prediction of human behavior patterns. On the basis of this, human culture is judged to be of Level Two, with few prospects for advancement to a higher level. —From the Universal Species Catalog (Subclass: Sapients)”

“That’s why we want it. Impossible gadgets are always the most valuable.”

“Birdie cringed. If there was one thing worse than being a coward, it was being mistaken for a hero.”

“Don’t confuse caution with cowardice.”

“Darya stood up, heard her voice rising, and knew she was doing what she insisted what a scientist should never do: allowing passion and the defense of personal theories to interfere with logical analysis.”

“Old habits did not just die hard. They refused to die at all.”

“Once you were committed to a course of action, you didn’t waste your time looking back and second-guessing the decision, because every action in life was taken on the basis of incomplete information. You looked at what you had, and you did all you could to improve the odds; but at some point you had to roll the dice—and live or die with whatever you had thrown.”

“The answers come pat and fast. You see, what the downsiders want isn’t an explanation; it’s a catchphrase they can use instead of an explanation.”

“Darya found the logic of her thought processes so compelling that it never occurred to her that others might have a different reaction. But they did.”

“If you win too easy, better ask what’s going on that you don’t know about.”

“But no one, no matter how intelligent, could make good inferences from bad data.”

“Darya was beginning to understand why she might be ruined forever for academic life. Certainly, the world of ideas had its own pleasures and thrills. But surely there was nothing to compete with the wonderful feeling of being alive, after knowing without a shadow of doubt that you would be dead in one second.”

“Nothing was more fascinating than information. It was infinite in quantity, or effectively so, limited only by the total entropy of the universe; it was vastly diverse and various; it was eternal; It was available for collection, anywhere and anytime. And, perhaps best of all, E. C. Tally thought with the largest amount of self-satisfaction that his circuits permitted, you never knew when it might come in useful.”

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

“Darya had a few moments of wild hope before logic intruded.”

““We’re all here,” said Louis Nenda’s voice.“Not a thing. Black as a politician’s heart.””

“Kallik’s explanation was neat, logical, and complete. Like most such explanations, it was, in Hans Rebka’s view, almost certainly wrong. That was not the way the real world operated.”

“Are we perhaps guilty of temporal chauvinism, believing that our own time is uniquely important, as all generation tend to think that their time is of unique importance?”

““Professor Lang’s important work, with all due respect, does not answer that question.”The knife, sliding in hidden behind the compliment. “With all due respect” meant “with no respect at all.””

“Theories were a dime a dozen. The partition that separated science and wishful thinking was evidence: observations and firm facts.”