“It turns out that if you optimize the performance of a car and of an airplane, they are very far away in terms of mechanical features. So you can make a flying car. But they are not very good planes, and they are not very good cars.”
— Gregory Benford
“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.”
— 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.”
— Gregory Benford
“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.”
— Gregory Benford
“Aging is mostly the failure to repair.”
— Gregory Benford
“As fandom grew more variegated, genzines reflected a broadening of interests, carrying personal columns of humor and reflection, science articles, amateur fiction, stylish gossip, and inevitably, thoughtful pieces on the future of fandom.”
— Gregory Benford
“…the movies are most people’s exposure to ideas about the future.”
— Gregory Benford
“Fame is the accumulation of misunderstandings around a well-known name”
— Gregory Benford
“I know that humans are fond of seeing their kind rendered in other media.”
— Gregory Benford
“Humans and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. With aliens, that has to go double.”
— Gregory Benford
“Redwing had read somewhere that one of his favourite writers, Ernest Hemingway, had been asked what was the best training for a novelist. He had said “an unhappy childhood.” Redwing had enjoyed a fine time growing up, but he wondered if this whole expedition was unfolding more like a novel, and would be blamed on one person, one character, the guy in charge: him. Maybe you got a happy childhood and then an unhappy adulthood, and that’s how novels worked.”
— Gregory Benford
“A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.”
— Gregory Benford
“In a tough situation, don’t avoid acting just because it’s easier or comfortable. Don’t lapse into a passive state. People who give up, die.”
— Gregory Benford
“Human life is a voyage on a sea of meaning, not a net of information.”
— Gregory Benford
“Between people long-married there is a diplomacy of the eyes”
— Gregory Benford
“To be a leader meant that sometimes you had to look away from the pain”
— Gregory Benford
“Civilization was a defense against nature’s raw power.”
— Gregory Benford
“But a lady forced is never a lady won”
— Gregory Benford
“Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, is the reverse.”
— Gregory Benford