Best 34 quotes of Gregory Benford on MyQuotes

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

Disintegration of structure equals information loss.

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.

If you are losing at a game, change the game.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Once you've grown up in space, moving on means moving out, not going back to Earth. Nobody wants to be a groundpounder.

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.

Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available

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

Peter Watts delivers-solid, inventive hard sf about the deep sea, but as we've never seen before. This moves like the wind.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

A big slice of the strange, a zap to the synaptic net, the shock of unending Otherness moistened with meaning, special stinks, grace notes, blaring daylight that illuminated without instructing. A marathon that addicted. To wake up from cold sleep and go into that, fresh from the gewgaws and flashy bubble gum of techno-Earth, was – well, a consummation requiring digestion. She could see that Redwing worried at this, could not let it go. Neither could she. Vexing thoughts came, flying strange and fragrant through her mind, but they were not problems, no. They were the shrapnel you carried, buried deep, wounds from meeting the strange.

A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.

Civilization was a defense against nature’s raw power.

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

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

How human, to ruminate even when in mortal danger

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

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.

Redwing had read somewhere that one of his favourite writers, Ernest Hemingway, had been asked what was the best training for a novelist. He had said “an unhappy childhood.” Redwing had enjoyed a fine time growing up, but he wondered if this whole expedition was unfolding more like a novel, and would be blamed on one person, one character, the guy in charge: him. Maybe you got a happy childhood and then an unhappy adulthood, and that’s how novels worked.

Sometimes being human is harder than it looks.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, is the reverse.

Yet how could the Empire possibly have kept itself stable, using such crude creatures as humans?

Your conflicts reflect subminds in dispute. Such is the human condition