Ben Bova Quotations

Omni is not a science magazine. It is a magazine about the future...Omni was sui generis. Although there were plenty of science magazines over the years...Omni was the first magazine to slant all its pieces toward the future. It was fun to read and gorgeous to look at.

I think it's perfectly OK to exploit the moon. Largely for two reasons: there's no life there, and it is close enough and rich enough in resources to be economically useful to Earth. In the final analysis, everything we do in space, if it does not help the people of Earth, all the people, it's not going to happen.

A new space race has begun, and most Americans are not even aware of it. This race is not [about] political prestige or military power. This new race involves the whole human species in a contest against time.

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.

Red tape has killed more people than bullets...

Feeding the starving poor only increases their number.

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.

The problem is that Americans would like to be independent of the rest of the world ... Except the world ain't that way. Trying to be independent of the rest of the world is to commit suicide.

Up here [in space], you're free. Really free, for the first time in your life. All the laws and rules and prejudices they've been dumping on you all your life . . . they're all down there. Up here it's a new start. You can be yourself and do your own thing . . . and nobody can tell you different.

My first published novel was written for teenagers, and there were rules laid down by the publisher: no sex, no smoking, no swearing. I blew up entire solar systems, I consigned billions of people to horrible death; they didn't seem to mind that at all. But no hanky-panky.

Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.

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.

When I started understanding how science works, it occurred to me that there just is no evidence that there is a God.

We have, I think, come through the big danger of a vast and sudden exchange of nuclear weapons, ... And I think the lesson we've learned is, if you have nuclear weapons, you probably don't dare use them.

Fortunately, they didn't find anything that contradicted what I had already written.

John Kennedy said, 'We are a great and powerful people' and we've been doing great and wonderful things. And we'll continue to do so,

I write historical novels that haven't happened yet,

We're living in a tremendous era of exploration,

This can happen, ... The moon is going to be the industrial center of all the things we do in space. It truly is a frontier. There is incredible wealth out there.

If you know what's happening in the research labs, it isn't all that great a trick to predict what's coming,