Top 100 Gregory Benford Quotes
#1. Around them small animals scampered along knotted cables and flaking vines, chirruping, squealing, venting yellow farts. Everywhere was animation, purpose, hurry. Momentum.
Gregory Benford
#2. 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
#3. Human life is a voyage on a sea of meaning, not a net of information.
Gregory Benford
#4. Congress came to see NASA primarily as a jobs program, not an exploratory agency.
Gregory Benford
#5. Never trust in theories, m'lad, if they're thought up by types who work in offices.
Gregory Benford
#6. 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
#7. 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
#9. Modern economics and the welfare state borrowed heavily on the future.
Gregory Benford
#10. Mathematics cannot handle physical quantities like density that literally go to infinity.
Gregory Benford
#13. We hope we can slow or possibly reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer's.
Gregory Benford
#14. If you think there is good in everybody, you haven't met everybody.
Gregory Benford
#15. Your conflicts reflect subminds in dispute. Such is the human condition
Gregory Benford
#17. We're more interested in the editor of this Astounding Science Fiction. General Groves sent me to ask that someone who knows more about this work you're doing interview this" - he glanced at a card - "John W. Campbell.
Gregory Benford
#18. 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
#19. Moe Berg. Until he's finished reading a paper, he considers it 'alive' and refuses to let anyone else touch it. When he's done, it's 'dead' and anybody can read it. Says he wants to integrate everything from various papers, get a picture - every day." "Then
Gregory Benford
#20. The people who built the space program - both Soviet and U.S. - were readers of science fiction.
Gregory Benford
#21. 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.
Gregory Benford
#23. 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
#24. Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
Gregory Benford
#25. Fandom grew first through individual correspondence. It was cheap and quick, continent-wide contact for a penny stamp.
Gregory Benford
#27. 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
#28. 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.
Gregory Benford
#29. 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
#30. It is the triumph of reason to get on well with those who possess none,
Gregory Benford
#31. '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
#32. Around 1930, a small new phenomenon arose in Depression-ridden America, spawned out of the letter columns in science fiction magazines: fandom.
Gregory Benford
#33. 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
#34. 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
#36. I've always felt that specialization is best left to the insects.
Gregory Benford
#37. It is one thing to speak of embracing the new, the fresh, the strange. It is another to feel that one is an insect, crawling across a page of the Encyclopedia Britannica, knowing only that something vast is passing by beneath, all without your sensing more than a yawning vacancy.
Gregory Benford
#38. Right. Isn't that how science works?" Redwing grinned. "If you don't understand, do an experiment.
Gregory Benford
#40. 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
#41. Seeing the space future through science fiction can be difficult. Much science fiction of the early era, the 1950s through the '70s, took an expansionist view.
Gregory Benford
#42. 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
#44. 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
#45. A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.
Gregory Benford
#46. They will do anything for the worker, except become one.
Gregory Benford
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Decide had the same root as suicide and homicide. Decisions felt like little killings. Somebody lost.
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. The Matrix itself is not some external evil, but rather an outcome of our own error, our karmic payoff of past actions. Not merely illusion, it is an allusion to a founding myth of our culture.
Gregory Benford
#52. Logic said it was impossible but logic wasn't doing too well here lately, was it?
Gregory Benford
#53. Cynic' is a word invented by optimists to criticize realists.
Gregory Benford
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Even their stable societies oscillated between banquets and barbarism.
Gregory Benford
#57. It seemed stupid to be pursued on foot like Homo sapiens sapiens of a hundred thousand years before.
Gregory Benford
#58. Look, it's not love that makes the world go round, it's inertia,
Gregory Benford
#60. Terraforming our moon will take many decades and vast abilities. Before we can begin, we'll have to master the resources of our solar system - especially transporting raw masses over interplanetary distances.
Gregory Benford
#62. The peers just fill the air with their speeches.""And from what I've seen, vice versa.
Gregory Benford
#63. Remember that people break down, too, not just machinery.
Gregory Benford
#64. 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
#66. 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
#67. Every professor secretly thinks that what the world needs is a good, solid lecture
from him, of course.
Gregory Benford
#68. 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
#69. (Crank theories) always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.
Gregory Benford
#71. When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work.
Gregory Benford
#72. Fame is the accumulation of misunderstandings around a well-known name
Gregory Benford
#73. The talk shows I've done are all radio for exactly this reason: I don't want to wear a rubber mask.
Gregory Benford
#74. No matter how much you plan for it, the real thing seems curiously, well, unreal.
Gregory Benford
#75. In your country the munitions makers ride in their limousines and prepare their wars, while the workers cannot afford new shoes.
Gregory Benford
#76. People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out.
Gregory Benford
#78. Between people long-married there is a diplomacy of the eyes
Gregory Benford
#79. Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.
Gregory Benford
#80. 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
#81. The personal was, compared with the tides of great nations, a bothersome detail.
Gregory Benford
#82. My brother Jim and I shared a womb without a view for nine months.
Gregory Benford
#83. The world is neither running down nor deterministic, and a strict division of order versus chaos is just wrong.
Gregory Benford
#84. One could copy a Self without knowing what it was. Just record it, like a musical passage; the machine which did that did not need to know harmony, structure.
Gregory Benford
#86. Civilization was a defense against nature's raw power.
Gregory Benford
#88. At least being prosperous set one apart in England; here it guaranteed nothing, not even taste.
Gregory Benford
#89. 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
#90. '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
#92. 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
#94. west. He liked the mild climate, the Sierras making it something like Colorado with a seashore. It took him several years to overcome the natural though secret belief of true New Yorkers, that people living somewhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding.
Gregory Benford
#95. 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
#96. Life has two important dates - when you're born and when you find out why. - Mark Twain 1.
Gregory Benford
#97. I have an artificial left shoulder, wired back together after a softball accident.
Gregory Benford
#98. As we all saw in grade school, once you learn how to read a book, somebody is going to want to write one - that's how authors are made. Once we know how to read our own genetic code, someone is going to want to rewrite that 'text,' tinker with traits - play God, some would say.
Gregory Benford
#99. Science would lead you to a more interesting life than something else.
Gregory Benford
#100. 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
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