Top 50 Gregory Benford Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you are losing at a game, change the game.”

— Gregory Benford

2. “To shine is better than to reflect.”

— Gregory Benford

3. “I don’t get even, I get odder.”

— Gregory Benford

4. “The biggest mistake is being too afraid of making one.”

— Gregory Benford

5. “Maybe education is wasted on the young.”

— Gregory Benford

6. “If you think there is good in everybody, you haven’t met everybody.”

— Gregory Benford

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

— Gregory Benford

8. “They will do anything for the worker, except become one.”

— Gregory Benford

9. “Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.”

— Gregory Benford

10. “It is better to be wrong than to be vague. In trial and error, the error is the true essential. – FREEMAN DYSON.”

— Gregory Benford

11. “Disintegration of structure equals information loss.”

— Gregory Benford

12. “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.”

— Gregory Benford

13. “On a merry-go-round in the night Coriolis was shaken with fright Despite how he walked ‘Twas like he was stalked By some fiend always pushing him right!”

— Gregory Benford

14. “When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work.”

— Gregory Benford

15. “Religions do not teach doubt.”

— Gregory Benford

16. “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

17. “Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.”

— Gregory Benford

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

— Gregory Benford

19. “Modern economics and the welfare state borrowed heavily on the future.”

— Gregory Benford

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

— Gregory Benford

21. “Everybody feels he has a right to a life of luxury – or at least comfort – so there’s a lot of frustration and resentment when the dream craps out.”

— Gregory Benford

22. “The peers just fill the air with their speeches.“”And from what I’ve seen, vice versa.”

— Gregory Benford

23. “Peter Watts delivers-solid, inventive hard sf about the deep sea, but as we’ve never seen before. This moves like the wind.”

— Gregory Benford

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

— Gregory Benford

25. “Scientists require apparatus, but mathists splendidly require only writing tools and erasers. Better, philosophers do not even need erasers.”

— Gregory Benford

26. “Fame is the accumulation of misunderstandings around a well-known name.”

— Gregory Benford

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

— Gregory Benford

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

— Gregory Benford

29. “Cynic’ is a word invented by optimists to criticize realists.”

— Gregory Benford

30. “Einstein tells a joke. “An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The bartender says: ‘What’ll it be, boys?’ The first mathematician: ‘I’ll have one half of a beer.’ Second mathematician: ‘I’ll have one quarter of a beer. Third mathematician: ‘I’ll have one eighth of a beer.’ Fourth mathematician: ‘I’ll have one sixteenth of a – ’ The bartender interrupts, ‘Know your limits, boys,’ as he pours out a single beer.”

— Gregory Benford

31. “Ugliness is nature’s contraceptive.”

— Gregory Benford

32. “The universe of artifacts was a human one.”

— Gregory Benford

33. “But a lady forced is never a lady won.”

— Gregory Benford

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

— Gregory Benford

35. “Sometimes being human is harder than it looks.”

— Gregory Benford

36. “The personal was, compared with the tides of great nations, a bothersome detail.”

— Gregory Benford

37. “Immortality is an aim, not a fact.”

— Gregory Benford

38. “The difference between a conviction and a prejudice is that you can explain a conviction without getting angry.”

— Gregory Benford

39. “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.”

— Gregory Benford

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

— Gregory Benford

41. “He had grown up believing that the universe was hostile to people and in a way that made them important. They were locked in a grand struggle with a great enemy. The truth was a lot worse. The universe did not care at all.”

— Gregory Benford

42. “To expect the world to treat you fairly because you’re a good person, my friend, is like expecting a bull not to charge you because you are a vegetarian.”

— Gregory Benford

43. “To be a leader meant that sometimes you had to look away from the pain.”

— Gregory Benford

44. “Very carefully he thought about nothing.”

— Gregory Benford

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

— Gregory Benford

46. “His ass knows more words than his mouth does.”

— Gregory Benford

47. “The physical laws are but the bars of a cage.”

— Gregory Benford

48. “Only a fool resists the delight of contradiction by nature.”

— Gregory Benford

49. “Decide had the same root as suicide and homicide. Decisions felt like little killings. Somebody lost.”

— Gregory Benford

50. “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.”

— Gregory Benford