Gregory Benford Quotes

Victims don't want to know they're victims. I guess that's just victim psychology: if you don't know about it, it's not really happening.

We all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don't to make it all bearable.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -it's human.

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.

Denial is a very powerful thing.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Humor is really laughing off a hurt, grinning at misery.

Humor is to get us over terrible things.

When you think you're a really good person, you're actually capable of doing some real harm to people, either knowingly or unknowingly. It's the big little lie that we all live in.

I surely don't think ignorance is bliss. But like everything else that has survived thousands of years of human evolution, ignorance - like denial, self-delusion, and magical thinking - seems to have its uses.

Time didn't heal, but it anesthetized. The human mind could only feel so much.

Obviously I wasn't playing well at the time. But as a player, you lie to yourself. You say, "There's nothing wrong. I'm just not on time [at the plate]." You make something else up because pain is not an option.

A man deep-wounded may feel too much pain To feel much anger.

Pain is a part of being alive, and we need to learn that. Pain does not last forever, nor is it necessarily unbeatable, and we need to be taught that.

And during the campaign of 1936, she writes that she and her brother would always rather be out doing things when they're sick, rather than take to their beds. And I think Eleanor Roosevelt always responded to pain by doing more, by doing something, by being active. And I think she just couldn't bear to look at her childhood grief. And she didn't.

And yet, I found I could survive. I was alert, I felt the pain - the aching loss that radiated out from my chest, sending wracking waves of hurt through my limbs and head - but it was manageable. I could live through it. I didn't feel like the pain had weakened over time, rather that I'd grown strong enough to bear it.

Luckily, I never feel at one time more than half my pains.

Blessed be shock. Blessed be the part of us that protects us from too much pain and sorrow. At the heart of life is a fusebox.

The pain doesn't go away. You just make room for it.

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.

I do think, half of what we call madness is just some poor slob dealing with pain by a strategy that annoys the people around him.

People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.

Don't knock rationalization. Where would we be without it? I don't know anyone who'd get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They're more important than sex. Have you ever gone a week without a rationalization?

The hardest thing you can do is smile when you are ill, in pain, or depressed. But this no-cost remedy is a necessary first half-step if you are to start on the road to recovery.