Gregory Benford Quotes

It's a hard man who's only just, and a sad man who's only wise.

Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.

Experience shows that if you put more ethicists on a problem, you can end up with more problems.

We hope we can slow or possibly reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer's.

They will do anything for the worker, except become one.

A view of nature as dense and nonlinear is at the core of our contemporary science. Process and order emerge subtly.

emerges from logic, not desire.

How human, to ruminate even when in mortal danger

The personal was, compared with the tides of great nations, a bothersome detail.

Peter Watts delivers-solid, inventive hard sf about the deep sea, but as we've never seen before. This moves like the wind.

But a lady forced is never a lady won

Karl remembered his great truth, learned in the project: Never pass by a chance to shut up.

To be a leader meant that sometimes you had to look away from the pain

To deliver vast new resources to humanity, we must pioneer and occupy the moon, Mars, and perhaps even beyond.

I like audacious ideas.

Around 1930, a small new phenomenon arose in Depression-ridden America, spawned out of the letter columns in science fiction magazines: fandom.

No matter how much you plan for it, the real thing seems curiously, well, unreal.

Like immense time-binding discussions, genres allow ideas to be developed and traded, and for variations to be spun down through decades.

The universe of artifacts was a human one.

If you are losing at a game, change the game.

Sometimes being human is harder than it looks.

Look, it's not love that makes the world go round, it's inertia,

The physical laws are but the bars of a cage.

Terrors can be mirrors, too.

Whatever the life form, evolution selects for economy of resources.

Civilization was a defense against nature's raw power.

Very carefully he thought about nothing.

Fame is the accumulation of misunderstandings around a well-known name

Yet how could the Empire possibly have kept itself stable, using such crude creatures as humans?

The peers just fill the air with their speeches.""And from what I've seen, vice versa.

Disintegration of structure equals information loss.

I'm a very big Faulkner fan 'cause I'm a Southerner.

Certainly I see no reason why society should prevent grieving parents from having a baby cloned from the cells of a dead child if they wish.

If you think there is good in everybody, you haven't met everybody.

Religions do not teach doubt.

The earliest depiction of libertarian eugenics may have appeared in a science fiction novel, Robert Heinlein's 1942 tale 'Beyond This Horizon.'

I don't get even, I get odder.

Life has two important dates - when you're born and when you find out why. - Mark Twain 1.

Sour grapes, the champagne of the intelligentsia.

amateur gynecology.

People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out.

Try to get all your posthumous medals in advance.

The movies are most people's exposure to ideas about the future.

Remember that people break down, too, not just machinery.

Mathematics cannot handle physical quantities like density that literally go to infinity.

If humans were good at anything, he thought, it was sure as hell good old running.

Scientists require apparatus, but mathists splendidly require only writing tools and erasers. Better, philosophers do not even need erasers

Fandom grew first through individual correspondence. It was cheap and quick, continent-wide contact for a penny stamp.

catch me with an unexpected result,

Between people long-married there is a diplomacy of the eyes

In a tough situation, don't avoid acting just because it's easier or comfortable. Don't lapse into a passive state. People who give up, die.

Aging is mostly the failure to repair.

Every professor secretly thinks that what the world needs is a good, solid lecture
from him, of course.

I know that humans are fond of seeing their kind rendered in other media.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

It was getting the results that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure.

Once you've grown up in space, moving on means moving out, not going back to Earth. Nobody wants to be a groundpounder.

You don't actually have ideas; ideas have you.

Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.

I've always felt that specialization is best left to the insects.

Nostalgia is eternal for Americans. We are often displaced from our origins and carry anxious memories of that lost past. We fear losing our bearings.

Your conflicts reflect subminds in dispute. Such is the human condition

Congress came to see NASA primarily as a jobs program, not an exploratory agency.

It seemed stupid to be pursued on foot like Homo sapiens sapiens of a hundred thousand years before.

abstract himself out of the moment

A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.

Even their stable societies oscillated between banquets and barbarism.

The biggest mistake is being too afraid of making one.

At least being prosperous set one apart in England; here it guaranteed nothing, not even taste.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, is the reverse.

Logic said it was impossible but logic wasn't doing too well here lately, was it?

It is the triumph of reason to get on well with those who possess none,

Everybody feels he has a right to a life of luxury - or at least comfort - so there's a lot of frustration and resentment when the dream craps out.

Modern economics and the welfare state borrowed heavily on the future.

My brother Jim and I shared a womb without a view for nine months.

Riemann conjecture,

Science would lead you to a more interesting life than something else.

We've got two parties." "No you do not. You have only the party of the banks, of the money men, and they divide it into two pieces for your voting.

Right. Isn't that how science works?" Redwing grinned. "If you don't understand, do an experiment.

Because the desire to possess the other is ... love

Remembering a narrative alters it.

True twins share womb chemistry and endure many fateful slings and arrows together. The fabled connection between twins is true in my case.

Dawidoff, Nicholas. The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg. New York: Vintage, 1994. de

As a literature of change driven by technology, science fiction presents religion to a part of the reading public that probably seldom goes to church.

Human life is a voyage on a sea of meaning, not a net of information.

Cynic' is a word invented by optimists to criticize realists.

In the end, postmodern art is obscene not because it is offensive, but because it is boring.

In your country the munitions makers ride in their limousines and prepare their wars, while the workers cannot afford new shoes.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, thought as a child, behaved as a child. But when I became a woman, I put away manly things.

The people who built the space program - both Soviet and U.S. - were readers of science fiction.

Ugliness is nature's contraceptive.

To shine is better than to reflect.

Immortality is an aim, not a fact.

The talk shows I've done are all radio for exactly this reason: I don't want to wear a rubber mask.

Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available

'Star Trek' is notorious for looting the more thoughtful work of writers for their striking effects, leaving behind most of the thought and subtlety.

Never trust in theories, m'lad, if they're thought up by types who work in offices.

I have an artificial left shoulder, wired back together after a softball accident.

When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work.

Decide had the same root as suicide and homicide. Decisions felt like little killings. Somebody lost.