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Quotes from The Compleat McAndrew — Charles Sheffield

1935–2002 England

← All quotes by Charles Sheffield

14 quotes

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

The Compleat McAndrew (2000)

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

The Compleat McAndrew (2000)

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

The Compleat McAndrew (2000)

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

The Compleat McAndrew (2000)

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

The Compleat McAndrew (2000)

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 Compleat McAndrew (2000)

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

The Compleat McAndrew (2000)

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.

The Compleat McAndrew (2000)

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 Compleat McAndrew (2000)

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.

The Compleat McAndrew (2000)

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

The Compleat McAndrew (2000)

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 Compleat McAndrew (2000)

The Asteroid Belt contains everything from substantial bodies like Ceres, seven hundred and fifty kilometers across, all the way down to house-sized boulders, pebbles, and grains of sand. One good rule of thumb is that for every object of a given size, there will be ten times as many one-third that size.

The Compleat McAndrew (2000)

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.

The Compleat McAndrew (2000)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Charles Sheffield (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.