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Gregory Benford
196 quotes
“Quite patently artificial,” she said. “Looks like it to me, and I’m just a physicist.” “I thought you were an engineer-pilot.” “Hey, physicists can do anything.” “Um. So they think. But not biology…”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think,” Jordin said mildly, “a professional biologist would label that aggressive behavior.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Would an alien outsider judge America’s performance by My Lai and Wounded Knee or by Lincoln and Jefferson?”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Definitions, her grandmother once said, had to be like a fat man’s belt—big enough to cover the subject but elastic enough to allow for change.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anyway, the Shanna woman was abrasive, self-obsessed, smug—and those were her good points. Julia suspected that in a pinch the woman might also be careless, the one sin reality never forgave.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was more known, but always more to be known. Yes, she thought, and the unknown can masquerade as the unknowable.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They had a legend about a Chemical pinned to a piece of dead matter and allowed to die that way—Diminished to extinction! Apparently a commonplace among Chemicals. Yet after this fearsome loss, the identity emerged from its full subtraction—to claim life again. Such a desperate story! Elementary knowledge tells us that such things do not happen, of course.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why paired?” Viktor asked. “Have two sexes?” “Hard to imagine how electromagnetic creatures could,” Mary Kay said. Viktor grinned. “Lack of imagination is not an argument. Especially lately.”
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“Better be a bit more diplomatic. Translation: cover your scientific ass.”
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“None of the above. That’s often the right answer, and bugger the exams.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But then, growing up was not supposed to be easy. One Mom remarked offhandedly, “It’s the toughest work you’ll ever do.”
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“Naturals felt best in groups of a hundred or so, and better if only a few dozen were involved. Hunting parties had been about that size, for the long-extinct big game. Many important institutions were of the same rough scale: the ancient village, governing councils of nations, commanding elites of vast armies, teams playing games, orchestras, family fests. All human enterprises that worked were of that size, and nearly everything that failed was not.”
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“In his view, the true deep human fantasy was the conviction of safety. Men believed their women were devoted; wives felt that their men were dependable. Both ignored contrary evidence.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From birth it had integrated each experience with its innate sense of balance and appropriate scale—indeed, this was the sole purpose of its conscious being.”
Gregory Benford (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For her it was a slippery descent into a labyrinth where twin urges fought, revenge versus survival. These two instincts, already ancient before the first hominid walked, rarely married with any security. Yet if she did not feel the pinch of their competition, she would not be, by her own judgment, a true human.”
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“You humans have emotions,” Seeker said slowly, “but more often emotions have you.”
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“They all lived as ants in the shadow of mountains of millennia, and time’s sheer mass shaded every word.”
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“History held counterexamples to any facile rule.”
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“Good food was like sex, one of life’s blessings, but they both lost their edge when talked about too much.”
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“You need friends to keep you on your feet, and enemies to keep you on your toes.”
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“In any case, caution outweighed theory, as mice knew about elephants.”
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“How can you shrug off history?”… “By studied neglect.”
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“Nothing is eternal—including prisons.”
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“Individual recollections of the past are easily shaped by others. After a while they need have little bearing on the once-lived events.”
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“The intellectual breeds of humans think in terms of abstractions. But most people have emotions and think they are having ideas.”
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“Seeker laughed. “You are so—well, human. You always think you are the ultimate.” “And…we’re not.” Seeker inspected the ceiling. “It seems unlikely.”
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“Uncompromising zeal doesn’t look in the mirror much.”
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“Curious, how any tool properly made acquires a beauty.”
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“While a gigantic amount has been written or spoken, culture in the end is the fraction that gets remembered.”
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“Propaganda of sufficient age became art.”
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“Great error, seen up close, can look like true greatness.”
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“Evolution was still at work, pruning the failures from the gene pool with unblinking patience.”
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“Weeds sprouted in spaces where once-important people had proclaimed that their presumptions were imperishable.”
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“So many people, close-packed.” “Your kind apparently enjoys the crowding.” “I…I can sort of see why it might be exciting. Like a never-ending party.” Speaker grimaced. “Just the sort of horror I imagined, yes.”
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“Nature’s nature was change. It was not a museum.”
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“To us, most human morality is carefully thought-through self-congratulation.”
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“When you know nothing, you are free to hope.”
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“The price of such seeing will be death,” Seeker said quietly. She blinked. “We’ve done fine so far.” “A numerical series can have many terms yet be finite.”
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“Quantum uncertainty, chaos—these forever screen precise knowledge of the future from our eyes.”
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“An animal that liked abstractions? Maybe that wasn’t all that bad a definition of being human.”
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“He was guilty of the heresy of humanism.” “How can that be heresy?” “The narcissistic devotion to things human? ‘Man is the measure of all things?’ Easily.”
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“Life was growing and spreading here the way a disease propagates and eats and in the eating must kill. There should be something more, he thought. A kind of being might come into the universe that did not want to finally eat everything or to command all or to fill every niche and site with its own precious self. It would be a strange thing, with enough of the brute biology in it to have the quick, darting sense of survival. But it would also have to carry something of the machine in it, the passive and accepting quality of duty, of waiting, and of thought that went beyond the endless eating or the fear of dying. To such a thing the universe would not be a battleground but a theater, where eternal dramas were acted out and it was best to be in the audience. Perhaps evolution, which had been at the beginning a blind force that pushed against everything, could find a path to that shambling, curiously lasting state.”
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“She had changed her name from the African Aleix to Alicia when she went away to college, fresh beginnings and all. Her parents had been into black roots and the rest of it when she was born, then had rapidly backed away. Her father’s political evolution had followed a trajectory away from what he termed in one of his op-ed pieces “the narcissism of minor differences.” He had approved her abandoning the Africa-nodding of Aleix, remarking only that his thinking in those days had been mere mulling over food and folktales. She had been surprised when he wrote a series of columns on his emergence, his recovery from her mother’s death in an auto accident, and one entirely about her. This was on his long march abandoning, in his phrase, “obligatory blackitude,” so he had folded it into a thesis about the hollowness of hauling out costumes and traditional foods from lands you had never even visited. He had taken a stand against a black group insisting on carrying their “cultural weapons” to political rallies, on grounds that they stood for a precious cultural inheritance which should be beyond criticism. Tom Butterworth (“Uncle Tom” to his enemies, of course) then argued that a ban on spears was scarcely an attack on their culture, since none of them knew much more about real spears than which was the business end.”
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“Indeed, she had tried to follow books and films about science, but they featured rugged, style-conscious folk who transacted their work in ornate bars, atmospheric dens thickly mired in a high-contrast noir underworld future where bizarre ornamentation passed for any sense of newness. She had never known anybody who could design an experiment or do a calculation on table napkins, sipping hip drinks while guitar riffs wailed in the smoky background, but in movies and TV this was standard, apparently to make matters more interesting to a weary public with the attention span of a commercial. Scientists were either aggressively hip, often clad in tight leather, or else pitiful, hopeless nerds, obsessional neurotics nobody would trust for a moment with the discoveries they had, quite implausibly, ushered into the world while anxiously trying to get laid.”
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“The evolutionary routes are many, she knew, wending through the howling wilderness of the maladaptive, on to their severely narrowed destinations. Biology abounded with convergent examples, destinations arrived at along very different paths. Fruiting bodies of slime molds and myxobacteria alike evolved multicelled advances. Warmbloodedness came forth several times, as did live birth and even penile tumescence. The eyes did indeed have it—as seen in the camera-like eyes of vertebrates and octopi, and the similar tiny preceptors of worms and jellyfish. Nature invented over and over again the mechanisms used by diverse organisms to hear, smell, echolocate, sense the prickle of electric and magnetic fields.”
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