Gregory Benford Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

There was something about such reflex stupidity that never failed to irritate him.

Gregory Benford
Disintegration of structure equals information loss.

Gregory Benford
Soldiers for equality, uh? Glad you warned me. I'd have thought you were just thieves.

Gregory Benford
All right, he thought, so the details were not perfect. But maybe, in a sense, that was part of the magic, too.

Gregory Benford
Man doesn't have to take a gamble just 'cause it's there. You got to learn that.

Gregory Benford
Organic forms are in the universe of things and also reside in the universe of essences. There we cannot go. … You are a spontaneous product of the universe of things. We are not. This seems to give you … windows. It was difficult for me to monitor your domestic transmissions, they fill up with branches, spontaneous paths, nuances…

Gregory Benford
You got to learn to wait people out. Hear what they got to say. Not enough to have a majority rule, y'know. Otherwise, the minority won't be convinced and they won't support the plan. No point havin' people at your elbow who're against what you're doin'. So we just got to talk it out Quaker-style till ever'body agrees. More efficient in the long run.

Gregory Benford
It was an example of what he thought of as the Law of Controversy: Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

Gregory Benford
Why must conversions always come so late? Why do people apologize to corpses?

Gregory Benford
You'll never get it to follow orders.
Slaves follow orders, Colonel. You want something done a slave can't, you don't ask for a slave to do it.

Gregory Benford
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
That thing doesn't care about you. It won't reward you when you take risks. It is simply indifferent. That's the fact about it that most never learn. They hate it and fear it and finally ignore it. Because of that. It would be easier if it hated us. Maybe even if it hunted us. But it doesn't care. Remember.

Gregory Benford
Free will again, Cathy said.
Or free won't, Peterson said mildly.

Gregory Benford
There's plenty—
Plenty is exactly what there's none of.

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

Gregory Benford
Every boy knows he is immortal, but his parents, they are not so sure.

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

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

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

Gregory Benford
Yes, perhaps that was it. For decades now the picture of the world painted by the scientists had become strange, distant, unbelievable. Far easier, then, to ignore it than try to understand. Things were too complicated. Why bother? Turn on the telly, luv. Right.

Gregory Benford
You had to form for yourself a lucid language for the world, to overcome the battering of experience, to replace everyday life's pain and harshness and wretched dreariness with — no not with certainty but with an ignorance you could live with. Deep ignorance, but still a kind that knew its limits. The limits were crucial.

Gregory Benford
(Crank theories) always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.

Gregory Benford
If you were damned certain you weren't looking for something, there was a very good chance you wouldn't see it.

Gregory Benford
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
Once introduced into this world, life would never leave—there was no end to the explosive, consuming, voracious lust of long chain molecules to link and match and make of themselves yet more and more and again more.

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

Gregory Benford
Major Sánchez grunted. Nice word, 'trivial.' Means you got it—cojones—you got no worry. If you don't—

Gregory Benford
Manuel stared at the place where Piet had been. The man he had known so little would now lie in this place far beyond the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome and the hammer of Marx, in a territory open and without plan, beyond man and his encasing theories, his filters, beyond the closed rooms of the civilized mind.

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

Gregory Benford