Quotes from Gregory Benford

You know, my dear, you're wrong that suffering ennobles people.... It simply makes one cross.

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.

Bad fiction uses the glossy generality; good writing needs the smattering of detail, the unrelenting busy mystery of the real.

But the answers come when they will, one piece at a time.

Why must conversions always come so late? Why do people apologize to corpses?

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, is the reverse.

A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.

When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work.

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. The Sunborn

The biggest mistake is being too afraid of making one.

Remember that people break down, too, not just machinery.

It is one thing to speak of embracing the new, the fresh, the strange. It is another to feel that one is an insect, crawling across a page of the Encyclopedia Britannica, knowing only that something vast is passing by beneath, all without your sensing more than a yawning vacancy.

Human life is a voyage on a sea of meaning, not a net of information.

Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment. —MULLA NASRUDIN

Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available

Even their stable societies oscillated between banquets and barbarism.

His ass knows more words than his mouth does.

Certainty is the lot of those who do not ask questions.

Scientists study the world as it is; engineers create the world that has never been. —THEODORE VON KÁRMÁN

If you think there is good in everybody, you haven't met everybody.

the movies are most people's exposure to ideas about the future.

Remembering a narrative alters it.

The universe of artifacts was a human one.

Self-knowledge, she thought ruefully, is mostly bad news.