Gregory Benford

“There’s plenty—”“Plenty is exactly what there’s none of.”

— Gregory Benford

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

— 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

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

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

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

The past was a jigsaw puzzle and you never had all the pieces.

— Gregory Benford

But no, the friend’s indictment was off target; he simply liked them tall, as long as they didn’t slump down in a forlorn effort to appear shorter. It seemed obvious to him that no woman looked good trying to be something she wasn’t.

— Gregory Benford

That was what drew him to mathematics. Not because it was rarefied, but because it probed to the subtle, deeper reality. People said that mathematicians were unworldly, and yammered on about how Einstein couldn’t make correct change. Nonsense. Einstein just didn’t give a damn. It was the subtle, the beautiful that concerned him.

— Gregory Benford

It was one thing to be instantly attracted to a woman, and another to like her independence, the way she took no notice of what he thought of her, one way or the other. She was indeed a modern woman—not aggressive, yet not submissive. A self-possessed apartness, a lack of cling...Yes, that was what held his attention: her reserve. The promise of depths you could not guess merely by seeing her in a swimsuit.

— Gregory Benford

“We will be just like the USA. Only we will be more honest.”“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

Archeology is mostly a process of making associations between objects, and every discovery opens up possible resonances with things we already have. Sometimes, simply wandering through a museum or a site can open your eyes.

— Gregory Benford

She stood up. “Professional? Ha! My father used to say, you have to be able to tell a tracheotomist from a cutthroat. Well, I can.”

— Gregory Benford

Maybe is not a theory, you know, it is merely maybe.

— Gregory Benford

Just because something’s crazy, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

— Gregory Benford

She always dressed well, but he recognized the signs of insecurity; certitude was inversely proportional to the amount of makeup.

— Gregory Benford

Still, Claire hated Charlotte Brontë’s comment that she would have given all her talent to be beautiful. That condemned you always to play somebody else’s game—and, when your looks failed—finally to lose.

— Gregory Benford

This was what never failed to stir her—the unfathomable gulf between today’s thinking and the way the ancients thought. They were truly alien, not merely innocent agrarians with a foolish faith.

— Gregory Benford

In popularizing a scientific development it was always crucial to sail the narrow strait between the Scylla of professional contempt and the Charybdis of public befuddlement.

— Gregory Benford

Hubris. They disliked questions unless there were clear answers. They believed so much in their method that they conjured up certainty out of undeniable risk.

— Gregory Benford

Talkers never acted when they could talk.

— Gregory Benford

“You know, my dear, you’re wrong that suffering ennobles people.” She’d stopped to massage her hip, wincing. “It simply makes one cross.”

— Gregory Benford

As Kurt Vonnegut pointed out in his first novel, Player Piano, some people love problem-solving and tinkering—and that is the final, irreducible driver of human history. Wars and faiths and leaders come and go, but the problem-solvers’ slow, steady work is the fulcrum upon which history turns.

— Gregory Benford

Trouble comes looking for you if you’re a fool.

— Gregory Benford

Must admit it felt good. First time in years anybody ever admitted I was right.

— Gregory Benford

He went to Los Angeles to do the work even though he hated the city; it was full of happy homogeneous people without structure or direction. While on the bus to work, it seemed to him Los Angeles went on long after it had already made its point.

— Gregory Benford

But the answers come when they will, one piece at a time.

— Gregory Benford

I would have to look, try to find a bridge that would make plausible what I knew but could scarcely prove. The standards of science are austere, unforgiving—and who would have it differently? I would have to hedge, to take one step back for each two forward, to compare and suggest and contrast, always sticking close to the data. And despite what I thought I knew now, the data would have to lead, they would have to show the way.

— Gregory Benford

Thunder impresses, but it’s lightning does the work.

— Gregory Benford

In its studies and learned colloquy, Faz saw and felt the tales of Men. They seemed curiously convoluted, revolving about Self. What mattered most to those who loved tales was how they concluded. Yet all Men knew how each ended. Their little dreams were rounded with a sleep.So the point of a tale was not how it ended, but what it meant. The great inspiring epic rage of Man was to find that lesson, buried in a grave.

— Gregory Benford

Nothing could be sure it was itself the original. So the only intelligent course lay in enjoying whatever life a being felt—living like a mortal, in the moment.

— Gregory Benford

The role of boredom in human history is underrated.

— Gregory Benford

Every age is known by its pleasures, Fielding reads from the library readout. The twentieth introduced two: high speed and hallucinogenic drugs. Both proved dangerous in the long run, which made them even more interesting.

— Gregory Benford

Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.

— Gregory Benford

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

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

Disintegration of structure equals information loss.

— 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

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

— Gregory Benford

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

— Gregory Benford

Only fools get to join.

— Gregory Benford

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

— 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

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

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

To shine is better than to reflect.

— 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

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

— 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

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

— Gregory Benford

Somehow to them, the press was always the judge of things scientific.

— Gregory Benford

“Free will again,” Cathy said.“Or free won’t,” Peterson said mildly.

— 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

Religions do not teach doubt.

— 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

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

— Gregory Benford

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

— Gregory Benford

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

— Gregory Benford

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

— 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

Major Sánchez grunted. “Nice word, ‘trivial.’ Means you got it—cojones—you got no worry. If you don’t—”

— Gregory Benford

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

— 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

“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

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

— Gregory Benford