Ten of My Favourite Ben Bova Quotes
Quotes, who doesn’t love a good quote? This series of articles we look at Top 10 Famous Quotes by Author Ben Bova, author quotes are always a challenge and fun to pick, with Ben Bova you will find my Ten favourites of Ben Bova’s quotes.
Popular Quotes
“Red tape has killed more people than bullets…”
― Ben Bova, Millennium
“A fanatic who is willing to die for his cause thinks nothing of killing you for his cause.”
― Ben Bova, The Return
“The Old Ones knew that life is not rare, but precious; not fragile, but vulnerable. Life is as deep as the seas in which it was born, as strong as the mountains that give it shelter, as universal as the stars themselves.”
― Ben Bova, Mars Life
“In science there is a dictum: don’t add an experiment to an experiment. Don’t make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don’t ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.”
― Ben Bova
“My first sight of the fabled warrior was a surprise. He was not a mighty-thewed giant, like Ajax. His body was not broad and powerful, as Odysseos’. He seemed small, almost boyish, his bare arms and legs slim and virtually hairless. His chin was shaved clean, and the ringlets of his long black hair were tied up in a silver chain. He wore a splendid white silk tunic, bordered with a purple key design, cinched at the waist with a belt of interlocking gold crescents… His face was the greatest shock. Ugly, almost to the point of being grotesque. Narrow beady eyes, lips curled in a perpetual snarl, a sharp hook of a nose, skin pocked and cratered… A small ugly boy born to be a king… A young man possessed with fire to silence the laughter, to stifle the taunting. His slim arms and legs were iron-hard, knotted with muscle. His dark eyes were absolutely humourless. There was no doubt in my mind that he could outfight Odysseos or even powerful Ajax on sheer willpower alone.”
― Ben Bova
“As long as we’re tied to Middle Eastern oil we’re tied to Middle Eastern politics. We’re hostages to the terrorists and nutcases who want to wipe out Israel and the United States because we support Israel.”
― Ben Bova, Powersat
“We try to teach our students how to think… how to use their brains and imagination. Individual subjects can always be learned by a man who knows how to learn. We teach them to think, and the other subjects arise by themselves…”
― Ben Bova, The Star Conquerors
“He did not appear to be a very tall man; what I could see of legs seemed stumpy, though heavily muscled. His chest was broad and deep. Later I learned that he swam in the sea almost every morning. His thick strong arms were circled with leather wristbands and a bronze armlet above his left elbow that gleamed with polished onyx and lapis lazuli… Puckered white scars from old wounds stood out against the dark skin of his arms, parting the black hairs like roads through a forest… Odysseos wore a sleeveless tunic, his legs and feet bare, but he had thrown a lamb’s fleece across his wide shoulders. His face was thickly bearded with dark curly hair that showed a trace of grey. His heavy mop of ringlets came down to his shoulders and across his forehead almost down to his black eyebrows. Those eyes were as grey as the sea outside on this rainy afternoon, probing, searching, judging.”
― Ben Bova
“Lolling around libraries paging through books that haven’t been checked out since 1975 is one of my principal joys as a writer.”
― Ben Bova, Nebula Awards Showcase 2008
“He was close enough so that I could see his face clearly, even with his helmet’s cheek flaps tied tightly under his bearded chin. I looked into the eyes of Hector, prince of Troy. Brown eyes they were, the colour of rich farm soil, calm and deep. No anger, no battle lust. He was a cool and calculating warrior, a thinker among these hordes of wild, screaming brutes. He wore a small round shield buckled to his left arm instead of the massive body-length type most of the other nobles carried. In it was painted a flying heron, a strangely peaceful emblem in the midst of all this mayhem and gore.”
― Ben Bova
10 Famous Quotes by Author Ben Bova
So there you have it my Ten favourite quotes by Ben Bova, please comment below and share your favourite quotes by the fantastic author Ben Bova. Furthermore, if you find any Authors not covered for there, top 10 quotes let me know and I will review their works and find some of their best quotes as has been done here for Ben Bova.
One Final Bonus – Longer – Ben Bova Quote
“The art of fiction has not changed much since prehistoric times. The formula for telling a powerful story has remained the same: create a strong character, a person of great strengths, capable of deep emotions and decisive action. Give him a weakness. Set him in conflict with another powerful character — or perhaps with nature. Let his exterior conflict be the mirror of the protagonist’s own interior conflict, the clash of his desires, his own strength against his own weakness. And there you have a story. Whether it’s Abraham offering his only son to God, or Paris bringing ruin to Troy over a woman, or Hamlet and Claudius playing their deadly game, Faust seeking the world’s knowledge and power — the stories that stand out in the minds of the reader are those whose characters are unforgettable.
To show other worlds, to describe possible future societies and the problems lurking ahead, is not enough. The writer of science fiction must show how these worlds and these futures affect human beings. And something much more important: he must show how human beings can and do literally create these future worlds. For our future is largely in our own hands. It doesn’t come blindly rolling out of the heavens; it is the joint product of the actions of billions of human beings. This is a point that’s easily forgotten in the rush of headlines and the hectic badgering of everyday life. But it’s a point that science fiction makes constantly: the future belongs to us — whatever it is. We make it, our actions shape tomorrow. We have the brains and guts to build paradise (or at least try). Tragedy is when we fail, and the greatest crime of all is when we fail even to try.
Thus science fiction stands as a bridge between science and art, between the engineers of technology and the poets of humanity.”
‘Actually I knocked out two,’ said Nightingale. ‘I have to admit that the first one took three shots, one to disable the tracks, one through the driver’s eye slot and one down the commander’s hatch – brewed up rather nicely.”
― Ben Bova
