Gregory Benford Quotes

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

~ Gregory Benford

But a lady forced is never a lady won

~ Gregory Benford

Civilization was a defense against nature’s raw power.

~ Gregory Benford

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

~ Gregory Benford

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

~ Gregory Benford

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

~ Gregory Benford

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

~ Gregory Benford

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.

~ Gregory Benford

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

~ Gregory Benford

I know that humans are fond of seeing their kind rendered in other media.

~ Gregory Benford

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

~ Gregory Benford

...the movies are most people's exposure to ideas about the future.

~ 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

Aging is mostly the failure to repair.

~ Gregory Benford

Very little useful science got done in the space station. NASA never did the experiments needed to develop the technologies required for a genuine interplanetary expedition: centrifugal gravity to avoid bodily harm and a truly closed biosphere.

~ 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 thing that most critics miss about Faulkner is that his famous storytelling voice is, in fact, a standard Southern storytelling voice that is typical of the Gulf Coast - Mississippi, Alabama and so on.

~ Gregory Benford

It turns out that if you optimize the performance of a car and of an airplane, they are very far away in terms of mechanical features. So you can make a flying car. But they are not very good planes, and they are not very good cars.

~ Gregory Benford