Charles Sheffield Quotes

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.

I'm getting old, thought Eileen Calder. Old and worn out and cynical. And being cynical is a lot worse than being old or worn out.

Sometimes I think about dying. And then I wonder about going to hell. And then I think that if and when I go there, the place will be completely organized and run by lost souls, with a council and a works committee and an ethics panel, and I'll feel right at home.

A joke was the best barometer for mental weather.

I'm fat...I regard that as healthy. Good food wards off disease. - Dr. Erasmus Darwin

«La vida, si no es una gloriosa aventura, no es nada».

Education isn't like a video, with a beginning and a middle and an end. It has a beginning, then it keeps going until you're dead. If it stops you are dead, even if you don't know it.

These inventions became, incidentally, increasingly revolting to me, for I was ineradicably marked by a touch of the old cavalryman's primitive evaluation. I admit that in the earliest times the horseman had a considerable advantage over the foot soldier. (On the other hand considerably higher expenses were involved.) But the advantage was balanced by the invention of gunpowder, so rightly lamented by Ariosto. It was the end of glorious armies like those led by Charles the Bold. Cavalry charges still took place of course – and I cannot consider it unfair for the infantryman to load and fire two or three times before he received his comeuppance – but after that, death came to the cavalry. The old Centaurs were overpowered by the new Titan. I had seen my own conqueror at close hand when I lay bleeding on the grass. He had unhorsed me – a sickly fellow, a pimply lad from the suburbs, some cutler from Sheffield or weaver from Manchester. He cowered behind his rubble heap, one eye shut, the other aiming at me across the machine gun, which did the damage. In a pattern of red and gray, he wove an evil cloth. This was the new Polyphemus or, rather, one of his lowest messenger boys with a wire mask before his one-eyed face. This was how the present masters looked. The beauty of the forests was past.

Era fuerte cuando él estaba débil, cortésmente débil cuando era él el fuerte.

Jeff wished he were a computer himself. It sounded so calm and certain. He, as usual, was terrified.

the writer liked machines and people who work with machines, he respected what they do, and he wrote poems showing that the lives of engineers and miners and pilots have their own excitement and romance.

you were being strangled by the biggest, most inefficient, best entrenched bureaucratic system in the history of the world. You were in school, adrift within an education system that had lost any interest in the value of knowledge, or truth, or discipline, or self-evaluation. Like all monopolies, it was more interested in perpetuating and protecting its own territory than in anything else.

there is a branch of science called geobotany. It is a way of looking for minerals by knowing that certain plants will only grow in their presence or absence, and sometimes by knowing that the plants themselves concentrate particular minerals in their leaves and stems.

From Aftermath: Dr. Oldfield “Single celled and oceanic forms will presumably survive but it might make life impossible for humans.” President Saul: “Actually, that tends to be my primary concern. Sponges and oysters will have to take care of themselves.