Gregory Benford

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"“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.”"

"Man doesn’t have to take a gamble just ’cause it’s there. You got to learn that."

"“There’s plenty—” “Plenty is exactly what there’s none of.”"

"Soldiers for equality, uh? Glad you warned me. I’d have thought you were just thieves."

"You got to learn to wait people out. Hear what they got to say. Not enough to have a majority rule, y’know. Otherwise, the minority won’t be convinced and they won’t support the plan. No point havin’ people at your elbow who’re against what you’re doin’. So we just got to talk it out Quaker-style till ever’body agrees. More efficient in the long run."

"Manuel stared at the place where Piet had been. The man he had known so little would now lie in this place far beyond the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome and the hammer of Marx, in a territory open and without plan, beyond man and his encasing theories, his filters, beyond the closed rooms of the civilized mind."

"Once introduced into this world, life would never leave—there was no end to the explosive, consuming, voracious lust of long chain molecules to link and match and make of themselves yet more and more and again more."

"Life was growing and spreading here the way a disease propagates and eats and in the eating must kill. There should be something more, he thought. A kind of being might come into the universe that did not want to finally eat everything or to command all or to fill every niche and site with its own precious self. It would be a strange thing, with enough of the brute biology in it to have the quick, darting sense of survival. But it would also have to carry something of the machine in it, the passive and accepting quality of duty, of waiting, and of thought that went beyond the endless eating or the fear of dying. To such a thing the universe would not be a battleground but a theater, where eternal dramas were acted out and it was best to be in the audience. Perhaps evolution, which had been at the beginning a blind force that pushed against everything, could find a path to that shambling, curiously lasting state."

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

"But no, the friend’s indictment was off target; he simply liked them tall, as long as they didn’t slump down in a forlorn effort to appear shorter. It seemed obvious to him that no woman looked good trying to be something she wasn’t."

"That was what drew him to mathematics. Not because it was rarefied, but because it probed to the subtle, deeper reality. People said that mathematicians were unworldly, and yammered on about how Einstein couldn’t make correct change. Nonsense. Einstein just didn’t give a damn. It was the subtle, the beautiful that concerned him."

"It was one thing to be instantly attracted to a woman, and another to like her independence, the way she took no notice of what he thought of her, one way or the other. She was indeed a modern woman—not aggressive, yet not submissive. A self-possessed apartness, a lack of cling... Yes, that was what held his attention: her reserve. The promise of depths you could not guess merely by seeing her in a swimsuit."

"“We will be just like the USA. Only we will be more honest.” ”We’ve got two parties.” “No you do not. You have only the party of the banks, of the money men, and they divide it into two pieces for your voting.”"

"Archeology is mostly a process of making associations between objects, and every discovery opens up possible resonances with things we already have. Sometimes, simply wandering through a museum or a site can open your eyes."

"Professors everywhere deplored examinations as an archaic technique, a fossil that recalled little red schoolhouses and memorizing the capitals of all the states. Regular progress and daily diligence mattered more, they felt, not an hour spent compressing months of learning onto a few sheets of paper. Far better to stress homework, classroom participation and the professor’s judgment. Regrettably, the large size of classes, and the requirements of society itself for pseudo-objective standards kept the exam structure firmly in place."

"She stood up. “Professional? Ha! My father used to say, you have to be able to tell a tracheotomist from a cutthroat. Well, I can.”"

"Maybe is not a theory, you know, it is merely maybe."

"Just because something’s crazy, doesn’t mean it’s wrong."

"She always dressed well, but he recognized the signs of insecurity; certitude was inversely proportional to the amount of makeup."

"Still, Claire hated Charlotte Brontë’s comment that she would have given all her talent to be beautiful. That condemned you always to play somebody else’s game—and, when your looks failed—finally to lose."

"This was what never failed to stir her—the unfathomable gulf between today’s thinking and the way the ancients thought. They were truly alien, not merely innocent agrarians with a foolish faith."

"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."

"Hubris. They disliked questions unless there were clear answers. They believed so much in their method that they conjured up certainty out of undeniable risk."

"Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced."

"He watched her putting away bacon and toast. “I remember breakfasts like that.” “First Law of Thermodynamics still applies. If you eat it, and you don’t burn it off, you sit on it.” “You burn it, looks like. Exercise? “Worry. Saves time and you don’t have to shower.”"

"A particle detector that ran beautifully was either obsolete or hadn’t been designed close enough to the cutting edge of the technology."

"Engineers never liked the unexplained, whereas physicists lived for it."

"Teaching was all very fine, but research made the heart sing."

"“So he looks like a potential Mr. Right?” “No, just Mr. Right Now.”"

"The problem with the unknown was its lack of road signs."

"She felt a tingling, curiously pleasurable: her “curiosity reflex,” she had called it in high school, when she had first glimpsed the serene certainties of physics, starkly contrasting with the world’s raw hubbub."

"A damned big clue, but pointing at what? When in doubt, get some numbers."

"The desire to find something could provoke what she called “wantum mechanics,” fishing a result out of nothing but noise."

"When in enough doubt, let your subconscious work on the problem."

"Only senators and simpletons thought science took place in neatly drawn boxes."

"“Diversity” had come to mean Balkanization."

"But in the divisions among students lay a deeper strategy. The administration practiced tactics of divide-and-conquer, turning each student faction into a client, supplicants to the ever-expanding executive corps who thought of themselves as “management,” of faculty as workers and students as captive customers. In this they merely mirrored the national political style, a legacy of the Twen Cen."

"She needed some fresh illumination, all right, but not the kind that comes through the west window of a church."

"Data always overruled theory."

"“Ummm,” Alicia said, trying to be polite. “Still sounds like we’re just making this up as we go along.” “We are.” Max grinned. “Invent, then check. It’s really the only way to make progress.”"

"“Law of the universe,” she said. “The longer the menu description, the worse the food.”"