Top 100 Gregory Benford Quotes
#1. Will searching for distant messages work? Is there intelligent life out there? The SETI effort is worth continuing, but our common-sense beacons approach seems more likely to answer those questions.
Gregory Benford
#2. No matter how much you plan for it, the real thing seems curiously, well, unreal.
Gregory Benford
#3. The talk shows I've done are all radio for exactly this reason: I don't want to wear a rubber mask.
Gregory Benford
#6. (Crank theories) always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.
Gregory Benford
#7. We have a name for people who create universes - they're called gods. There is no greater hubris than to think that we could take the place of godlike implications.
Gregory Benford
#8. With a knock, a slim army lieutenant came in, introduced himself as James Benford, and handed Groves a briefing summary folder. "You have to approve these, sir." Karl
Gregory Benford
#9. The peers just fill the air with their speeches.""And from what I've seen, vice versa.
Gregory Benford
#12. Look, it's not love that makes the world go round, it's inertia,
Gregory Benford
#13. Even their stable societies oscillated between banquets and barbarism.
Gregory Benford
#14. True twins share womb chemistry and endure many fateful slings and arrows together. The fabled connection between twins is true in my case.
Gregory Benford
#15. In science fiction, basic doubts featured prominently in the worlds of Philip K. Dick. I knew Phil for 25 years, and he was always getting onto me, a scientist. He was a great fan of quantum uncertainty, epistemology in science, the lot.
Gregory Benford
#16. Cynic' is a word invented by optimists to criticize realists.
Gregory Benford
#17. Fermi started to calculate on his own, saying nothing, and in a direct, simple way found the essential point. The ability of a centrifuge to separate U-235 from U-238 was proportional to its length and to the fourth power of the peripheral speed of its rotor. Karl
Gregory Benford
#18. 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.
Gregory Benford
#19. I have an artificial left shoulder, wired back together after a softball accident.
Gregory Benford
#20. Life has two important dates - when you're born and when you find out why. - Mark Twain 1.
Gregory Benford
#21. I knew personally many figures in this novel: Harold Urey, who greeted me at the grad students reception at UCSD in 1963; Karl Cohen, my father-in-law;
Gregory Benford
#23. Government regulations had limited fabric lengths, banished pleats, and forbade having more than one pocket. Men now had a slim trim in the pant legs and women looked more military - gray flannel suits, low-heeled shoes in polished fake leather, shoulder-strap bags, berets and felt cloche hats.
Gregory Benford
#25. 'Star Trek' is notorious for looting the more thoughtful work of writers for their striking effects, leaving behind most of the thought and subtlety.
Gregory Benford
#26. People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out.
Gregory Benford
#28. Civilization was a defense against nature's raw power.
Gregory Benford
#30. The personal was, compared with the tides of great nations, a bothersome detail.
Gregory Benford
#31. Freeman murmured at his elbow, "Let him go. I'm working on an even bigger nuclear rocket, called Orion. We might take a cruise out to Saturn on it by the 1980s or
Gregory Benford
#32. Between people long-married there is a diplomacy of the eyes
Gregory Benford
#33. Fandom grew first through individual correspondence. It was cheap and quick, continent-wide contact for a penny stamp.
Gregory Benford
#34. Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
Gregory Benford
#35. The thing that most critics miss about Faulkner is that his famous storytelling voice is, in fact, a standard Southern storytelling voice that is typical of the Gulf Coast - Mississippi, Alabama and so on.
Gregory Benford
#37. Indeed, the history of 20th century physics was in large measure about how to avoid the infinities that crop up in particle theory and cosmology. The idea of point particles is convenient but leads to profound, puzzling troubles.
Gregory Benford
#39. Around them small animals scampered along knotted cables and flaking vines, chirruping, squealing, venting yellow farts. Everywhere was animation, purpose, hurry. Momentum.
Gregory Benford
#42. Mathematics cannot handle physical quantities like density that literally go to infinity.
Gregory Benford
#43. Modern economics and the welfare state borrowed heavily on the future.
Gregory Benford
#45. The moon's closeness is a huge advantage: To make it habitable, we would first have to bombard it with water-ice comets, a tricky endeavor best attempted with the many resources waiting on and near Earth.
Gregory Benford
#46. One of the laws of nature," Gordon said, "is that half the people have got to be below average.""For a Gaussian distribution, yeah," Cooper said. "Sad, though.
Gregory Benford
#47. Human life is a voyage on a sea of meaning, not a net of information.
Gregory Benford
#48. Genre pleasures are many, but the quality of shared values within an ongoing discussion may be the most powerful, enlisting lifelong devotion in its fans.
Gregory Benford
#49. If you think there is good in everybody, you haven't met everybody.
Gregory Benford
#50. 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.
Gregory Benford
#51. Invoking nature with its implied supremacy ignores that many cultures have fundamentally differing ideas of even what nature is, much less how it should work.
Gregory Benford
#52. Electromagnetic theory and experiment gave us the telephone, radio, TV, computers, and made the internal combustion engine practical - thus, the car and airplane, leading inevitably to the rocket and outer-space exploration.
Gregory Benford
#53. A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.
Gregory Benford
#54. Definitions, her grandmother once said, had to be like a fat man's belt - big enough to cover the subject but elastic enough to allow for change.
The Sunborn
Gregory Benford
#56. Science fiction writers didn't predict the fade-out of NASA's manned space operations, and they weren't prepared with alternative routes to space when that decline became undeniable.
Gregory Benford
#57. Fermi turned to Bohr with weary eyes and a slanted smile, and shrugged. "So we thought we had discovered new elements. We even named them - hesperium, ausonium. Wrong! Mythical! They were ordinary old barium and iodine. We were careful - too careful.
Gregory Benford
#59. Once you've grown up in space, moving on means moving out, not going back to Earth. Nobody wants to be a groundpounder.
Gregory Benford
#60. Reared in rural southern Alabama, we enjoyed an idyllic Huck Finn boyhood. But education there was casual at best. Our mother and father were high school teachers and challenged the pervasive easy-going ignorance.
Gregory Benford
#61. 'Star Trek's insight lay in the promise of going to the stars together, with well-defined stereotypes who could supply the emotional frame for the potentially jarring truths of these distant places.
Gregory Benford
#62. It turns out that if you optimize the performance of a car and of an airplane, they are very far away in terms of mechanical features. So you can make a flying car. But they are not very good planes, and they are not very good cars.
Gregory Benford
#63. Dinner at college high table is one of the legendary experiences of England. I could remember keenly each one I had attended; the repartee is sharper than the cutlery.
Gregory Benford
#64. A view of nature as dense and nonlinear is at the core of our contemporary science. Process and order emerge subtly.
Gregory Benford
#66. Experience shows that if you put more ethicists on a problem, you can end up with more problems.
Gregory Benford
#67. As fandom grew more variegated, genzines reflected a broadening of interests, carrying personal columns of humor and reflection, science articles, amateur fiction, stylish gossip, and inevitably, thoughtful pieces on the future of fandom.
Gregory Benford
#68. To deliver vast new resources to humanity, we must pioneer and occupy the moon, Mars, and perhaps even beyond.
Gregory Benford
#69. Whatever the life form, evolution selects for economy of resources.
Gregory Benford
#70. It was getting the results that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure.
Gregory Benford
#71. he knew from studying maps in preparation: the broad avenues leading to the Brandenburg Gate. He had played Bach's Brandenburg Concertos records many times, intricate magic alive in the air. The gate that led to the town of Brandenburg an der Havel.
Gregory Benford
#73. Virtuality - connection without proximity - is a major attraction in both fandom and the Net. Nobody knows you're a dog through the U.S. mail, either. Fans could be utterly different in their fanzine persona, which may be why both fandom and the Net were invented by individualistic Americans.
Gregory Benford
#76. 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.
Gregory Benford
#77. It really helps if you know your subject matter immediately. I find that enormously useful because then you can concentrate on all the usual novelistic things - the character, the plot and so forth - and you don't have to spend an enormous amount of time learning another trade, essentially.
Gregory Benford
#78. Because I've been a full professor doing research and lecturing at the University of California, I didn't have a lot of time to write, so I have always used my unconscious a great deal to do the really heavy lifting.
Gregory Benford
#79. I know that humans are fond of seeing their kind rendered in other media.
Gregory Benford
#81. The movies are most people's exposure to ideas about the future.
Gregory Benford
#82. The common liberal orthodoxy that living close to the land leads to eco-awareness is historically naive, considering that Mesopotamia, northern Africa, and the Mayan civilization were ruined by people who had lived there quite a long while.
Gregory Benford
#84. Humans and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. With aliens, that has to go double.
Gregory Benford
#85. Dawidoff, Nicholas. The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg. New York: Vintage, 1994. de
Gregory Benford
#86. Maybe it was common for intelligent beings anywhere to think of themselves as the crown of creation - The People - and everybody else as a smart animal at best.
Gregory Benford
#87. 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.
Gregory Benford
#88. To be a leader meant that sometimes you had to look away from the pain
Gregory Benford
#89. 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.
Gregory Benford
#90. In temperate zones, winter is the best insecticide; it keeps the bugs in check. The tropics enjoy no such respite, so plants there have developed a wide range of alkaloids that kill off nosy insects and animals.
Gregory Benford
#91. In the end, postmodern art is obscene not because it is offensive, but because it is boring.
Gregory Benford
#92. Karl remembered his great truth, learned in the project: Never pass by a chance to shut up.
Gregory Benford
#93. Then the 1956 Peace Prize went to Eisenhower and Khrushchev for agreeing not to build the hydrogen bomb. That agreement was now also called the Szilard Treaty. Today the H-bomb was a threshold no one dared cross without exciting hostile moves by all other powers.
Gregory Benford
#94. Peter Watts delivers-solid, inventive hard sf about the deep sea, but as we've never seen before. This moves like the wind.
Gregory Benford
#95. Scientists require apparatus, but mathists splendidly require only writing tools and erasers. Better, philosophers do not even need erasers
Gregory Benford
#96. the strategic situation foreseen by Robert Heinlein in the death dust story was like "a duel in a vestibule with flamethrowers," anticipating mutual assured destruction and its acronym quite nicely. Tolstoy famously
Gregory Benford
#97. The earliest depiction of libertarian eugenics may have appeared in a science fiction novel, Robert Heinlein's 1942 tale 'Beyond This Horizon.'
Gregory Benford
#99. My feeling is that science is virtually an unexplored ground. It's very visible - more so all the time - but there's no fiction that tells us how scientists think, and they really don't think the way that other people do.
Gregory Benford
#100. Yet how could the Empire possibly have kept itself stable, using such crude creatures as humans?
Gregory Benford
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