Gregory Benford Quotes

I loved the college experience of studying.

The sharing of food is the basis of social life.

I'm always looking for a nexus, where you can put all these diverse people together, see how they respond to one another, see what they learn about each other, and what they like and don't like.

Of all wit's uses, the main one is to live well with who has none.

To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province.

I'm open to meet any person; I think we can learn from one another.

Being a professor and working are not the same thing. The academic community is composed largely of nitwits. If I may generalize. People who don't know very much about what matters very much, who view life through literature rather than the other way around.

I’m really looking forward to embracing some of the great traditions at the University of Tennessee, for instance the Vol Walk, running through the T, singing Rocky Top all night long after we beat Florida next year. It will be a blast

I just like seeing people. I just like meeting people. I like finding out new walks of life and new ideas.

She was good at talking with young people. She seemed to view them as interesting foreigners.

To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.

Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

I say everything's about company. A gourmet meal with an asshole is a horrible meal. A hot dog with an interesting person is an amazing meal.

The necessity of labor and conversation with many men and things to the scholar is rarely well remembered.

I went to the University of Virginia and I came from, I grew up in suburban Philadelphia.

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food, and few things in the world are more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards life.

Avoid banquets which are given by strangers an ignorant persons. But if there is ever occasion to join them, let your attention be carefully fixed, that you slip not into the manner of the vulgar (the uninstructed).

The uses of travel are occasional, and short; but the best fruit it finds, when it finds it, is conversation; and this is a main function of life.

I've been trying to get into the Royal Box in New York for years. They say I'm too dirty, my material is too blue. But I think Redd, the whites and blue can be a nice combination.

Boycotts don't work. They work in certain isolated situations, where you have some potential. But in the main, the best way to bring about freedom in a society is to normalize, have tourism, have trade, have contact.

I really enjoy learning about other people and I'm really curious about other people.

So how as a nation can we sit around and eat Mexican food, and drink beer and make friends? That's the question. If we can do that on a broader scale, I think we'll come out of it all right.

I've never liked the idea of just having an office in a college somewhere and teaching classes and going to the library and doing research all day. I've never wanted that. The glamorous life is the life that appeals to me.

I set it down as a maxim, that it is good for a man to live where he can meet his betters, intellectual and social.

This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse -- appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances. As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.