American author & astrophysicist (1941- )
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.
GREGORY BENFORD
Artifact
Maybe is not a theory, you know, it is merely maybe.
GREGORY BENFORD
Artifact
Time goes, you say? ah no! Alas, time stays, we go.
GREGORY BENFORD
Furious Gulf
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.
GREGORY BENFORD
Artifact
The role of boredom in human history is underrated.
GREGORY BENFORD
"Doing Lennon", Analog, April 1975
The physical laws are but the bars of a cage.
GREGORY BENFORD
In the Ocean of Night
Between people long-married there is a diplomacy of the eyes.
GREGORY BENFORD
Foundation's Fear
He went to Los Angeles to do the work even though he hated the city; it was full of happy homogeneous people without structure or direction. While on the bus to work, it seemed to him Los Angeles went on long after it had already made its point.
GREGORY BENFORD
"White Creatures", In Alien Flesh
Disintegration of structure equals information loss.
GREGORY BENFORD
In the Ocean of Night
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.
GREGORY BENFORD
Against Infinity
No matter how much you plan for it, the real thing seems curiously, well, unreal.
GREGORY BENFORD
Timescape
Religions do not teach doubt.
GREGORY BENFORD
Timescape
Every boy knows he is immortal, but his parents, they are not so sure.
GREGORY BENFORD
Against Infinity
Somehow to them, the press was always the judge of things scientific.
GREGORY BENFORD
Timescape
Thunder impresses, but it's lightning does the work.
GREGORY BENFORD
"Time's Rub", Asimov's, April 1985
If you were damned certain you weren't looking for something, there was a very good chance you wouldn't see it.
GREGORY BENFORD
Timescape
It was getting the results that made science worth doing; the accolades were a thin, secondary pleasure.
GREGORY BENFORD
Timescape
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
Timescape
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.
GREGORY BENFORD
Against Infinity
Marches don't stop markets.
GREGORY BENFORD
The Man Who Sold the Stars