Foundation's Fear Quotes

“Human life is a voyage on a sea of meaning, not a net of information.”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“If you think there is good in everybody, you haven’t met everybody.”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“every professor secretly thinks that what the world needs is a good, solid lecture--from him, of course.”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“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

“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, Foundation's Fear

“To be a leader meant that sometimes you had to look away from the pain”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“Between people long-married there is a diplomacy of the eyes”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“Scientists require apparatus, but mathists splendidly require only writing tools and erasers. Better, philosophers do not even need erasers”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“But a lady forced is never a lady won”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“Decide had the same root as suicide and homicide. Decisions felt like little killings. Somebody lost.”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“Sometimes being human is harder than it looks.”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“Because the desire to possess the other is... love”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“the light ash of a butterfly wing incinerated in a forest fire.”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“No, I do not. There is no virtue greater than chastity in women—or in men. Our Lord was chaste, as are our saints and priests.” “Priests chaste!” He rolled his eyes. “Pity you weren’t at the school my father forced me to attend as a boy. You could have so informed the Jesuits, who daily abused their innocent charges.”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“tightbeam.”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“Earth is more legend than fact.”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“Sir, ‘pessimist’ is a term invented by optimists to describe realists.”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“suicide is the most sincere form of self-criticism.”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“Civilization was a defense against nature’s raw power.”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“It’s a hard man who’s only just, and a sad man who’s only wise.”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“To hide in the Mesh, software broke his simulation up into pieces which could run in different processing centers. Each fragment buried itself deep in a local algorithm. To a maintenance program, the pirated space looked like a subroutine running normally. Such masked bins even seemed to be optimizing performance: disguise was the essential trick.”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“How human, to ruminate even when in mortal danger”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“ Still, he reminded himself, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“Your conflicts reflect subminds in dispute. Such is the human condition”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“I know that humans are fond of seeing their kind rendered in other media.”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“Plaster holo screens against a mountain a full kilometer high, covering it until it glitters with a half million dancing images. Each holo used a quarter of a million pixels to shape its image, so the array musters immense representational power. Now compress those screens on a sheet of aluminum foil a millimeter thick. Crumple it. Stuff it into a grapefruit. That is the brain, a hundred billion neurons firing at varying intensities. Nature had accomplished that miracle,”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“One could copy a Self without knowing what it was. Just record it, like a musical passage; the machine which did that did not need to know harmony, structure.”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear

“It is the triumph of reason to get on well with those who possess none,”
― Gregory Benford, Foundation's Fear