Gregory Benford Quotes

We prefer the well-being of our country over the well-being of an individual or group.

The relative absence from the national [Japanese] character of egotistical individualism has been the saving of an empire; has enabled a great people to preserve its independence against prodigious odds.

Questions about who we are and who we want t be are increasingly prominent in our society. We have left behind Soviet ideology and there will be no return.

in their ideal forms nation and empire stand at opposite ends of a political spectrum, but in the actuality of history they influenced, reinforced, and undermined one another at different times and in different ways.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don't give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth.

The story of James Delaney is also someone who very deliberately presents himself as an individual and plays nations against each other, plays the East India against the Crown, all of those sort of overwhelming concepts that ran the world at the time.

I have never liked France or the French, and I have never stopped saying so. (15th February 1945)

To be modern is not a fashion, it is a state. It is necessary to understand history, and he who understands history knows how to find continuity between that which was, that which is, and that which will be.

We're going to fight and we're going to fight for every stretch of this nation.

Before our eyes we have the results of ideologies such as Marxism, Nazism and fascism, and also of myths like racial superiority, nationalism and ethnic exclusivism. No less pernicious, though not always as obvious, are the effects of materialistic consumerism, in which the exaltation of the individual and the selfish satisfaction of personal aspirations become the ultimate goal of life. In this outlook, the negative effects on others are considered completely irrelevant.

If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.

Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State... Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual.

For the Fascist, everything is the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian.

The individual is losing significance; his destiny is no longer what interests us.

England is an aquarium, not a nation.

The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.

My generation those who were students in the late 60s was always, in the words of the Who, talking about our generation. That's what we thought of ourselves, as the most important thing since sliced bread. And the "we" that we meant was really the Western Europeans and American generation. And as I think back I suppose I have a sense of guilt on behalf of my generation, a sense that we were terribly provincial and didn't understand the really important stuff that was going on in Eastern Europe.

Architecture is the work of nations

By and by when each nation has 20,000 battleships and 5,000,000 soldiers we shall all be safe and the wisdom of statesmanship will stand confirmed.

We shot that in Morocco, and got out of the country at the beginning of July - and two months later came the attack on Twin Towers. The movie was then released in December, so that kind of atmosphere is not something that was unfamiliar to me.

Donald Trump is going to remain completely focused on American citizens and people who are here legally, and how we get this country working for people who play by the rules.

The French, for example, are a contemptible nation.

"The State of the Jews" was not a title of a country. It was a title of a futuristic novel.

Nations which don't find their national identities will be preyed upon by other nations.

That nation is great which rests its head upon death as its pillow.