“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.”
Afterword (p. 498)
Timescape (1980)
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Gregory Benford 87
Science fiction author and astrophysicist 1941Related quotes

“Children are memory's voices, and preserve
The dead from wholly dying.”
Source: Oresteia (458 BC), The Libation Bearers, lines 505–506 (tr. E. D. A. Morshead)

"The Holy Dimension", p. 333
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
Context: Faith is not a thing that comes into being out of nothing. It originates in an event. In the spiritual vacancy of life something may suddenly occur that is like the lifting of a veil at the horizon of knowledge. A simple episode may open sight of the eternal. A shift of conceptions, boisterous like a tempest of soft as a breeze may swerve a mind for an instant or forever. For God is not wholly silent and man is not always deaf. God's willingness to call men to His service and man's responsiveness to the divine indications in things and events are for faith what sun and soil are for the plant.

Vol. I : The Dedication (March 1772)
Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion (1772–1774)
Context: The mind of man can never be wholly barren. Through our whole lives we are subject to successive impressions; for, either new ideas are continually flowing in, or traces of the old ones are marked deeper. If, therefore, you be not acquiring good principles be assured that you are acquiring bad ones; if you be not forming virtuous habits you are, how insensibly soever to yourselves, forming vicious ones…

Five Essays on Liberty (2002), Two Concepts of Liberty (1958)
Context: If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict — and of tragedy — can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as Acton conceived of it — as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need, arising out of our confused notions and irrational and disordered lives, a predicament which a panacea could one day put right.

“That which we die for lives as wholly as that which we live for dies.”

“If the life we live in this world is wholly for Christ, it is a life of daily surrender.”
Vol. 6, p. 116
Testimonies for the Church (1855 - 1868)