Freeman Dyson Quotes

You ask: what is the meaning or purpose of life? I can only answer with another question: do you think we are wise enough to read God's mind?

If you want to have a program for moving out into the universe, you have to think in centuries not in decades.

The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe.

A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.

Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.

The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm.

Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science.

In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.

So long as you have courage and a sense of humor, it is never too late to start life afresh.

Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.

In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses.

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.

The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.

CO2 is so beneficial...it would be crazy to try to reduce it

The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don't have PhDs.

It is better to be wrong than to be vague.

Science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.

When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories.

It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.

In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be right.

We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.

We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!

It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear.

To me, mathematics is like playing the violin. Some people can do it - others can't. If you don't have it, then there's no point in pretending.

No matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness, and memory.

There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.

The media always tries to make everything into a disaster, but it's mostly rubbish.

We cannot hope to either understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.

Everything in my life was luck. The key to having an interesting life is to always say "yes" to anything crazy.

The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.

I'm happy that I've raised six kids, and not one of them is a Ph.D.

For a physicist mathematics is not just a tool by means of which phenomena can be calculated, it is the main source of concepts and principles by means of which new theories can be created.

Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.

Aviation is the branch of engineering that is least forgiving of mistakes.

If we want to go to space with humans, that's for fun not for science. Human adventures in space are just sporting events.

Younger people have so many opportunities. I don't see any pessimism among them.

To give us room to explore the varieties of mind and body into which our genome can evolve, one planet is not enough.

Nothing is boring if you look at carefully.

I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce.

One factor that has remained constant through all the twists and turns of the history of physical science is the decisive importance of the mathematical imagination.

That was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan. He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover.

Mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our understanding.

Our thinking is permeated by our historical myths

I think it's a big mistake to decide too soon what you're going to do with your life.

Vegetation is really controlling what happens...whereas the emphasis in the climate models has always been on the atmosphere.

The reason why new concepts in any branch of science are hard to grasp is always the same; contemporary scientists try to picture the new concept in terms of ideas which existed before.

Ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.

The public knows that human beings are fallible. Only people blinded by ideology fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility.

The thing that makes me most optimistic is China and India - both of them doing well.