Gregory Benford quotes:

One of the laws of nature," Gordon said, "is that half the people have got to be below average.""For a Gaussian distribution, yeah," Cooper said. "Sad, though.

Jeff Carver is a hard sf writer who gets it right-his science and his people are equally convincing. NEPTUNE CROSSING combines his strengths, from a chilling look at alien machine intelligence, to cutting-edge chaos theory, to the pangs of finite humans in the face of the infinite. If you like intriguing ideas delivered in an exciting plot, this is your meat.

Around them small animals scampered along knotted cables and flaking vines, chirruping, squealing, venting yellow farts. Everywhere was animation, purpose, hurry. Momentum."

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.

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

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

(Crank theories) always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.

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

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

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

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

Disintegration of structure equals information loss.

Modern economics and the welfare state borrowed heavily on the future.

Religions do not teach doubt.

Ugliness is nature's contraceptive.

Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.

Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.

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.

I don't get even, I get odder.

If you are losing at a game, change the game.

Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available

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

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.

SF is a controlled way to think and dream about the future. An integration of the mood and attitude of science (the objective universe) with the fears and hopes that spring from the unconscious. Anything that turns you and your social context, the social you, inside out. Nightmares and visions, always outlined by the barely possible.

Space travel leading to skylife is vital to human survival, because the question is not whether we will be hit by an asteroid, but when. A planetary culture that does not develop spacefaring is courting suicide. All our history, all our social progress and growing insight will be for nothing if we perish. No risk of this kind, however small it might be argued to be, is worth taking, and no cost to prevent it is too great. No level of risk is acceptable when it comes to all or nothing survival.

The biggest mistake is being too afraid of making one.

The peers just fill the air with their speeches.""And from what I've seen, vice versa.

There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities - potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry - that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics.

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

To shine is better than to reflect.

You had to form for yourself a lucid language for the world, to overcome the battering of experience, to replace everyday life's pain and harshness and wretched dreariness with - no not with certainty but with an ignorance you could live with. Deep ignorance, but still a kind that knew its limits. The limits were crucial.

When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work.