Quotes from Gregory Benford

Electromagnetic theory and experiment gave us the telephone, radio, TV, computers, and made the internal combustion engine practical - thus, the car and airplane, leading inevitably to the rocket and outer-space exploration.

Science would lead you to a more interesting life than something else.

I'm a very big Faulkner fan 'cause I'm a Southerner.

The people who built the space program - both Soviet and U.S. - were readers of science fiction.

The thing that most critics miss about Faulkner is that his famous storytelling voice is, in fact, a standard Southern storytelling voice that is typical of the Gulf Coast - Mississippi, Alabama and so on.

I've always felt that specialization is best left to the insects.

Fandom grew first through individual correspondence. It was cheap and quick, continent-wide contact for a penny stamp.

Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.

Religions do not teach doubt.

Yes, perhaps that was it. For decades now the picture of the world painted by the scientists had become strange, distant, unbelievable. Far easier, then, to ignore it than try to understand. Things were too complicated. Why bother? Turn on the telly, luv. Right.

Free will again, Cathy said. Or free wont, 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.

"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."

There was something about such reflex stupidity that never failed to irritate him.

All right, he thought, so the details were not perfect. But maybe, in a sense, that was part of the magic, too.

To shine is better than to reflect.

It was an example of what he thought of as the Law of Controversy: Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

At least being prosperous set one apart in England; here it guaranteed nothing, not even taste.

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

For decades now the picture of the world painted by the scientists had become strange, distant, unbelievable. Far easier, then, to ignore it than try to understand. Things were too complicated. Why bother? Turn on the telly, luv. Right.

Once you've grown up in space, moving on means moving out, not going back to Earth. Nobody wants to be a groundpounder.

Life is a long march, an endless column of souls moving forward through surrounding dark. In that crowd nobody knows where they're going, but there is plenty of talk, and the fools, some called philosophers, pretend to understand.

The past was a jigsaw puzzle and you never had all the pieces.