Gregory Benford Quotes

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…

Somehow to them, the press was always the judge of things scientific.

That’s how business works. There’s always somebody coming in on your blind side.

Given a choice between existential despair and rapt religious fervor, her crowd chose marijuana.

As a political commentator of the time put it, most real-world people she knew thought of Washington, D.C., as a whorehouse where every four years ordinary folk got to elect a new piano player.

Physicists had abandoned God long ago and hoped that firing repeated questions at nature would get to the truth. What scientists really believed in was that the think-check-think-again style of scientific method would yield some species of Truth.

Religions do not teach doubt.

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.”

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.

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.

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…

She needed some fresh illumination, all right, but not the kind that comes through the west window of a church.

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.

None of the above. That’s often the right answer, and bugger the exams.

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