Quotes from Gregory Benford

the Law of Controversy: Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

Yet how could the Empire possibly have kept itself stable, using such crude creatures as humans?

Flattery isn't the highest compliment – parasitism is.

every professor secretly thinks that what the world needs is a good, solid lecture--from him, of course.

Around them small animals scampered along knotted cables and flaking vines, chirruping, squealing, venting yellow farts. Everywhere was animation, purpose, hurry. Momentum.

Social laws acted and people were maimed, damaged, robbed, and strangled by forces they could not even glimpse. People were driven to sickness, to desperation, to loneliness and fear and remorse. Shaken by tears and longing, in a world they fundamentally failed to fathom, they nonetheless carried on. There was

We have a name for people who create universes - they're called gods. There is no greater hubris than to think that we could take the place of godlike implications.

Because I've been a full professor doing research and lecturing at the University of California, I didn't have a lot of time to write, so I have always used my unconscious a great deal to do the really heavy lifting.

Enzymes - plainly the most important biotechnology of our era - already permeate many industrial processes. Unlike fossil fuels, they carry chemical programming which drives complex reactions, are renewable, and work at ordinary pressures and temperatures.

When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work.

Very little useful science got done in the space station. NASA never did the experiments needed to develop the technologies required for a genuine interplanetary expedition: centrifugal gravity to avoid bodily harm and a truly closed biosphere.

It really helps if you know your subject matter immediately. I find that enormously useful because then you can concentrate on all the usual novelistic things - the character, the plot and so forth - and you don't have to spend an enormous amount of time learning another trade, essentially.

Virtuality - connection without proximity - is a major attraction in both fandom and the Net. Nobody knows you're a dog through the U.S. mail, either. Fans could be utterly different in their fanzine persona, which may be why both fandom and the Net were invented by individualistic Americans.

The common liberal orthodoxy that living close to the land leads to eco-awareness is historically naive, considering that Mesopotamia, northern Africa, and the Mayan civilization were ruined by people who had lived there quite a long while.

Like immense time-binding discussions, genres allow ideas to be developed and traded, and for variations to be spun down through decades.

Terraforming our moon will take many decades and vast abilities. Before we can begin, we'll have to master the resources of our solar system - especially transporting raw masses over interplanetary distances.

To deliver vast new resources to humanity, we must pioneer and occupy the moon, Mars, and perhaps even beyond.

The world is neither running down nor deterministic, and a strict division of order versus chaos is just wrong.

My feeling is that science is virtually an unexplored ground. It's very visible - more so all the time - but there's no fiction that tells us how scientists think, and they really don't think the way that other people do.

Whatever the life form, evolution selects for economy of resources.

People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out.