Gregory > Gregory's Quotes

“Obama was the fourth president I had worked for who said outright that he wanted to eliminate all nuclear weapons (Carter, Reagan, and Bush 41 were the others). Former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former defense secretary Bill Perry, and former senator Sam Nunn had also called for “going to zero.” The only problem, in my view, was that I hadn’t heard the leaders of any other nuclear country—Britain, France, Russia, China, India, or Pakistan—signal the same intent.”
― Robert M. Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

“A big slice of the strange, a zap to the synaptic net, the shock of unending Otherness moistened with meaning, special stinks, grace notes, blaring daylight that illuminated without instructing. A marathon that addicted.
To wake up from cold sleep and go into that, fresh from the gewgaws and flashy bubble gum of techno-Earth, was – well, a consummation requiring digestion.
She could see that Redwing worried at this, could not let it go. Neither could she. Vexing thoughts came, flying strange and fragrant through her mind, but they were not problems, no. They were the shrapnel you carried, buried deep, wounds from meeting the strange.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“Remembering a narrative alters it.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, is the reverse.”
― Gregory Benford, The Martian Race

“When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“It is one thing to speak of embracing the new, the fresh, the strange. It is another to feel that one is an insect, crawling across a page of the Encyclopedia Britannica, knowing only that something vast is passing by beneath, all without your sensing more than a yawning vacancy.”
― 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 and Larry Niven Bowl of Heaven Beth

“Definitions, her grandmother once said, had to be like a fat man's belt - big enough to cover the subject but elastic enough to allow for change.

The Sunborn”
― Gregory Benford

“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, Bowl of Heaven

“Fame is the accumulation of misunderstandings around a well-known name”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“Yet how could the Empire possibly have kept itself stable, using such crude creatures as humans?”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“If humans were good at anything, he thought, it was sure as hell good old running.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar