Gregory Benford Quotes

Trouble comes looking for you if you’re a fool.

Minds embodies in strange shapes would still find themselves sharpened against evolution’s ceaseless whetstone.
What challenges would they face? In the end the universe as a whole was life’s ultimate opponent.

Media bloomed with florid discussions between completely uninformed people about every detail imaginable.

It was an example of what he thought of as the Law of Controversy: Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

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.

Boundaries got redrawn at the point of a sword, and the legal frame followed.

Einstein said that the only incomprehensible thing about the universe was that it was comprehensible. But resorting to God forgets what biology says—that our minds came out of the physical world, y’know, through evolution of early brain stems and neural systems to higher levels of complexity.

Soldiers for equality, uh? Glad you warned me. I’d have thought you were just thieves.

All the astronauts were easy on the eyes. No coincidence. NASA didn’t train people the public wouldn’t want to watch.

Data always overruled theory.

Science was a systematic way to avoid fooling yourself, after all.

Man doesn’t have to take a gamble just ’cause it’s there. You got to learn that.

Organic forms are in the universe of things and also reside in the universe of essences. There we cannot go. … You are a spontaneous product of the universe of things. We are not. This seems to give you … windows. It was difficult for me to monitor your domestic transmissions, they fill up with branches, spontaneous paths, nuances…

As Kurt Vonnegut pointed out in his first novel, Player Piano, some people love problem-solving and tinkering—and that is the final, irreducible driver of human history. Wars and faiths and leaders come and go, but the problem-solvers’ slow, steady work is the fulcrum upon which history turns.

The problem with the unknown was its lack of road signs.