Gregory Benford Quotes & Sayings

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

To shine is better than to reflect. — Gregory Benford

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

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

Ugliness is nature's contraceptive. — Gregory Benford

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

When a particle's wavelength became smaller than the Schwarzschild radius, the disciplines of gravitation and particle physics merged. The minimum mass where this occurred was scarcely a thousandth of a grain of sand. Still, for fundamental particle physics this was incredibly huge, a million million million times the weight of a uranium nucleus. — Gregory Benford

You speak French and Italian?" Moe lounged back, crossing long legs. "Having been acquainted for years with that beautiful creature known as Latin, I try to savor its ornate, loquacious offspring. Yet the French accent eludes me." Karl smiled. Somehow this big guy with an easy, sliding smile and precise diction made you like him. Presence, that's it. "My wife can help you with that. Have dinner with us." Moe Berg — Gregory Benford

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

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

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

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

Science is like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversation forever provisional and personal and living. — Gregory Benford

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

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

Sometimes being human is harder than it looks. — Gregory Benford

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

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

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

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

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, is the reverse. — Gregory Benford

I'm a very big Faulkner fan 'cause I'm a Southerner. — Gregory Benford

Civilization was a defense against nature's raw power. — Gregory Benford

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

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

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

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

Humans and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. With aliens, that has to go double. — Gregory Benford

At the end of the day, I sit down for about five minutes and review all the problems I'm working on, research problems or writing problems, and I go to sleep. Then when I wake up in the morning, I've trained myself to not open my eyes and to just lie there and recall the problems and see if there's anything there. — Gregory Benford

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

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

Peterson remembered with a smile that the US Department of the Interior had made a thorough prediction of trends in 1937, and had missed atomic energy, computers, radar, antibiotics, and World War II. Yet they all kept on, with this simple-minded linear extrapolation that was, despite a bank of computers to refine the numbers, still merely a new way to be stupid in an expensive fashion. — Gregory Benford

The physical laws are but the bars of a cage. — Gregory Benford

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

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

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

amateur gynecology. — Gregory Benford

emerges from logic, not desire. — Gregory Benford

Because the desire to possess the other is ... love — Gregory Benford

He saw a small, secondary explosion in the mushroom column. A yellow sphere flared in orange and then smoke swamped it. It had to be chemical, but what - Ah, he thought. All the iron in the buildings and soil has been thrown up in fine particles. Hot, too. It met the oxygen. "A rust bomb," he whispered. Weird, but probably right. And nobody had thought of it before. Karl — Gregory Benford

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

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

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

How human, to ruminate even when in mortal danger — Gregory Benford

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

I had the mistaken idea, based on what happened in World War I, that we would stay out of the war, and it is very unfortunate that I felt like that. If I had been more convinced, as Wigner and Szilard were, that we were going to get into the war, I would have pushed harder to begin making the bomb. I figured out that roughly half a million to a million people were being killed a month in the later stages of the war. Every month by which we could have shortened the war would have made a difference of a half million to a million lives, including the life of my own brother. — Gregory Benford

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

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

Within an hour Groves's teletype rattled out a translation. My fellow Germans! I live! Yet another of the countless atrocities that have befallen our lands has stricken Berlin - but not me. I am speaking to you so that you can hear my voice and know that I myself am not injured and well. The vast crime in Berlin has destroyed the entire center. But it cannot destroy the inevitable victory of the National Socialist Reich! My survival is a confirmation of the task imposed upon me by Providence - and — Gregory Benford

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

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

When Joseph Wambaugh writes about the LAPD, you listen because you know he knows the scene. Lots of people write cop novels, but they don't have that authenticity. — Gregory Benford

Aging is mostly the failure to repair. — Gregory Benford

'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

Like the ocean, land plants hold about three times as much carbon as the atmosphere. While oceans take many centuries to exchange this mass with the air, flora take only a few years. — Gregory Benford

Try to get all your posthumous medals in advance. — Gregory Benford

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

Our moon was born too small to harbor life. It came from the collision of a Mars-sized world into the primordial Earth. From that colossal crunch spun a disk of rocks that condensed into a satellite. — Gregory Benford

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

When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work. — Gregory Benford

Remembering a narrative alters it. — Gregory Benford

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

Szilard encouraged me to apply for a postdoc position at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore, though he knew I might work on nuclear weapons eventually. My job interview with Teller was both stimulating and unnerving; at the end of it, I suspected Teller understood my thesis better than I did. It was also terrifying; I had no warning who would interview me. — Gregory Benford

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

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

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

They thought the Allies would be desperate to "buy" their reactor research in the postwar era. Apparently they were not moved to check to see whether this arrogance was founded, and the depression and desperation one hears them going through after Hiroshima and Nagasaki reveals their sudden irrelevance. As Otto Hahn chided them right after they learned of Hiroshima: "If the Americans have a uranium bomb, then you're all second-raters." The — Gregory Benford

Very carefully he thought about nothing. — Gregory Benford

The universe of artifacts was a human one. — Gregory Benford

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. — Gregory Benford

abstract himself out of the moment — Gregory Benford

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

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

DNA sequencing opens vast ethical issues. We shall be able to know who has defective genes. What will it mean when we can be sure we're not all born equal? Worked out, the implications will scare a lot of people. Insurance companies will not want to cover those with a genetic predisposition to illness, for example. Here lurk myriad lawsuits. — Gregory Benford

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

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

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

In early 1945 Berg did go to Switzerland, as depicted here a bit earlier, to kill Heisenberg if necessary. Sitting in the front row of Heisenberg's seminar, he determined that the Germans were nowhere near their goal, so he complimented Heisenberg on his speech about field theory and walked him back to his hotel. Moe Berg's report was distributed to Britain's prime minister, Winston Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and key figures in the team developing the atomic bomb. Roosevelt responded: "Give my regards to the catcher." Werner — Gregory Benford

If you are losing at a game, change the game. — Gregory Benford

'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

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

Freeman looked up and grinned. "Karl, this author is American and plainly loves twisted language. Listen: 'The idiot god Azathoth, that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity.' Superb nonsense." Karl snorted. "Why are you reading such stuff?" "It's a novel of horror. Seems appropriate in a war, somehow." Karl — Gregory Benford

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced. — Gregory Benford

Jeff Carver is a hard sf writer who gets it right-his science and his people are equally convincing. NEPTUNE CROSSING combines his strengths, from a chilling look at alien machine intelligence, to cutting-edge chaos theory, to the pangs of finite humans in the face of the infinite. If you like intriguing ideas delivered in an exciting plot, this is your meat. — Gregory Benford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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