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Gregory Benford
196 quotes
“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 (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No matter how much you plan for it, the real thing seems curiously, well, unreal.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was getting the results that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The personal was, compared with the tides of great nations, a bothersome detail.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Modern economics and the welfare state borrowed heavily on the future.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Major Sánchez grunted. “Nice word, ‘trivial.’ Means you got it—cojones—you got no worry. If you don’t—”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every boy knows he is immortal, but his parents, they are not so sure.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man doesn’t have to take a gamble just ’cause it’s there. You got to learn that.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s plenty—” “Plenty is exactly what there’s none of.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Soldiers for equality, uh? Glad you warned me. I’d have thought you were just thieves.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The past was a jigsaw puzzle and you never had all the pieces.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We will be just like the USA. Only we will be more honest.” ”We’ve got two parties.” “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 (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Professors everywhere deplored examinations as an archaic technique, a fossil that recalled little red schoolhouses and memorizing the capitals of all the states. Regular progress and daily diligence mattered more, they felt, not an hour spent compressing months of learning onto a few sheets of paper. Far better to stress homework, classroom participation and the professor’s judgment. Regrettably, the large size of classes, and the requirements of society itself for pseudo-objective standards kept the exam structure firmly in place.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe is not a theory, you know, it is merely maybe.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Just because something’s crazy, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She always dressed well, but he recognized the signs of insecurity; certitude was inversely proportional to the amount of makeup.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: This is derived from the third of Arthur C. Clarke's three laws : "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." There are other variants which had inverted this including one known as Gehm's co…
“He watched her putting away bacon and toast. “I remember breakfasts like that.” “First Law of Thermodynamics still applies. If you eat it, and you don’t burn it off, you sit on it.” “You burn it, looks like. Exercise? “Worry. Saves time and you don’t have to shower.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A particle detector that ran beautifully was either obsolete or hadn’t been designed close enough to the cutting edge of the technology.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Engineers never liked the unexplained, whereas physicists lived for it.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Teaching was all very fine, but research made the heart sing.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Part 2 “May 2005”, Chapter 1 (p. 51)
“So he looks like a potential Mr. Right?” “No, just Mr. Right Now.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The problem with the unknown was its lack of road signs.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She felt a tingling, curiously pleasurable: her “curiosity reflex,” she had called it in high school, when she had first glimpsed the serene certainties of physics, starkly contrasting with the world’s raw hubbub.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A damned big clue, but pointing at what? When in doubt, get some numbers.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The desire to find something could provoke what she called “wantum mechanics,” fishing a result out of nothing but noise.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When in enough doubt, let your subconscious work on the problem.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only senators and simpletons thought science took place in neatly drawn boxes.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Diversity” had come to mean Balkanization.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But in the divisions among students lay a deeper strategy. The administration practiced tactics of divide-and-conquer, turning each student faction into a client, supplicants to the ever-expanding executive corps who thought of themselves as “management,” of faculty as workers and students as captive customers. In this they merely mirrored the national political style, a legacy of the Twen Cen.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She needed some fresh illumination, all right, but not the kind that comes through the west window of a church.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Data always overruled theory.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ummm,” Alicia said, trying to be polite. “Still sounds like we’re just making this up as we go along.” “We are.” Max grinned. “Invent, then check. It’s really the only way to make progress.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Law of the universe,” she said. “The longer the menu description, the worse the food.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I like Orange County, though. It’s like L.A. without caffeine.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source