Gregory Benford

You got to learn to wait people out. Hear what they got to say. Not enough to have a majority rule, y’know. Otherwise, the minority won’t be convinced and they won’t support the plan. No point havin’ people at your elbow who’re against what you’re doin’. So we just got to talk it out Quaker-style till ever’body agrees. More efficient in the long run.

Manuel stared at the place where Piet had been. The man he had known so little would now lie in this place far beyond the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome and the hammer of Marx, in a territory open and without plan, beyond man and his encasing theories, his filters, beyond the closed rooms of the civilized mind.

If you were damned certain you weren’t looking for something, there was a very good chance you wouldn’t see it.

Soldiers for equality, uh? Glad you warned me. I’d have thought you were just thieves.

The past was a jigsaw puzzle and you never had all the pieces.

“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.”

Every boy knows he is immortal, but his parents, they are not so sure.

All right, he thought, so the details were not perfect. But maybe, in a sense, that was part of the magic, too.

Man doesn’t have to take a gamble just ’cause it’s there. You got to learn that.

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

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.

Major Sánchez grunted. “Nice word, ‘trivial.’ Means you got it—cojones—you got no worry. If you don’t—”