Gregory Benford Quotes

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.

When in enough doubt, let your subconscious work on the problem.

Marches don’t stop markets.

After weeks of indoor work it actually felt good to be doing something—clean, direct, muscles and mind.

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.

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.

One of the laws of nature," Gordon said, "is that half the people have got to be below average." "For a Gaussian distribution, yeah," Cooper said. "Sad, though.

While politicians wrangled on the front pages of our newspapers, quiet revolutions looked within. Only occasionally did the news I thought most notable make the front page. All of it hinged on the steady building of connections which marks modern science.

She sighed. “We’re just guessing.”
“When you have a Ph. D., you call them hypotheses, not guesses.”

To peer through the quick stubble of mathematics and see the wonders lurking behind was to momentarily live in the infinite, beyond the press of the ordinary world where everyone else dwelled in ignorance.

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.

Viktor! Don't tell me you cheated! A gentleman doesn't cheat at cards." "Am captain, not gentleman.

Thing about crazies is, they’re crazy. You can’t even understand them in retrospect.

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

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.