Gregory Benford Quotes

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.

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.

Every boy knows he is immortal, but his parents, they are not so sure.

Major Sánchez grunted. “Nice word, ‘trivial.’ Means you got it—cojones—you got no worry. If you don’t—”

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.

Modern economics and the welfare state borrowed heavily on the future.

The personal was, compared with the tides of great nations, a bothersome detail.

It was getting the results that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure.

No matter how much you plan for it, the real thing seems curiously, well, unreal.

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.

Religions do not teach doubt.

If you were damned certain you weren’t looking for something, there was a very good chance you wouldn’t see it.

“Free will again,” Cathy said.
“Or free won’t,” Peterson said mildly.

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

(Crank theories) always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.