Gregory Benford famous quotes

04-17-2025

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

#Technology #Doe
They will do anything for the worker, except become one.
-- Gregory Benford

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

#Air #Vices #Peers
At least being prosperous set one apart in England; here it guaranteed nothing, not even taste.
-- Gregory Benford

#Taste #England #Prosperous
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

#Dream #Frustration #Luxury
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

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

#Firsts #Crank #Theory
Religions do not teach doubt.
-- Gregory Benford

#Doubt #Teach
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

#Pain #Ignorance #Everyday
No matter how much you plan for it, the real thing seems curiously, well, unreal.
-- Gregory Benford

#Real #Matter #Plans
It was getting the results that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure.
-- Gregory Benford

#Pleasure #Made #Results
The personal was, compared with the tides of great nations, a bothersome detail.
-- Gregory Benford

#Details #Tides
Modern economics and the welfare state borrowed heavily on the future.
-- Gregory Benford

#Welfare #Economics #Modern
Disintegration of structure equals information loss.
-- Gregory Benford

#Loss #Information #Structure
People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out.
-- Gregory Benford

#Self #People #Identity
Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
-- Gregory Benford

#Technology #Magic
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

#Giving Up #People #Acting
When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work.
-- Gregory Benford

#Chemistry #Experiments
Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available
-- Gregory Benford

#Real #Passion #Information
The biggest mistake is being too afraid of making one.
-- Gregory Benford

#Mistake #Biggest Mistake
To shine is better than to reflect.
-- Gregory Benford

#Shining
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

#Moving #Wind #Sea
SF is a controlled way to think and dream about the future. An integration of the mood and attitude of science (the objective universe) with the fears and hopes that spring from the unconscious. Anything that turns you and your social context, the social you, inside out. Nightmares and visions, always outlined by the barely possible.
-- Gregory Benford

#Dream #Attitude #Spring
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

#Cutting #Ideas #People
There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities - potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry - that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics.
-- Gregory Benford

#Real #Iron #Greek
If you are losing at a game, change the game.
-- Gregory Benford

#Games #Losing #Clarity
Space travel leading to skylife is vital to human survival, because the question is not whether we will be hit by an asteroid, but when. A planetary culture that does not develop spacefaring is courting suicide. All our history, all our social progress and growing insight will be for nothing if we perish. No risk of this kind, however small it might be argued to be, is worth taking, and no cost to prevent it is too great. No level of risk is acceptable when it comes to all or nothing survival.
-- Gregory Benford

#Suicide #Space #Risk
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

#Voice #Forever #Literature

You may also like:

Alastair Reynolds
Author
Alfred Bester
Author
Arthur C. Clarke
Film writer
Ben Bova
Author
Brian Aldiss
Film writer
David Brin
Scientist
David G. Hartwell
Editor
Frederik Pohl
Writer
George Zebrowski
Author
Greg Bear
Author
Jerry Pournelle
Fiction writer
Joe Haldeman
Author
Kevin J. Anderson
Author
Kim Stanley Robinson
Writer
Larry Niven
Author
Philip Jose Farmer
Author
Poul Anderson
Author
Robert Silverberg
Author
Stephen Baxter
Author
William Rotsler
Cartoonist