Gregory Benford

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

Between people long-married there is a diplomacy of the eyes

To be a leader meant that sometimes you had to look away from the pain

Civilization was a defense against nature__ raw power.

But a lady forced is never a lady won

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, is the reverse.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Aging is mostly the failure to repair.

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.

...the movies are most people's exposure to ideas about the future.

Fame is the accumulation of misunderstandings around a well-known name

I know that humans are fond of seeing their kind rendered in other media.

Humans and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. With aliens, that has to go double.

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 __n 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__ how novels worked.

A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.