Freeman Dyson Quotes

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

We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.

Technology without morality is barbarous; morality without technology is impotent.

Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague.

Do not imagine that you have to know everything before you can do anything. My own best work was done when I was most ignorant.

A model is done when nothing else can be taken out.

There is no way to find the best design except to try out as many designs as possible and discard the failures.

If you don't have a nasty obituary you probably didn't matter.

The history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were impossible.

When the great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in muddled, incomplete and confusing form. ... For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.

For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.

Things are always more complicated than most people believe.

[John Wheeler] rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians

Almost everything about the universe is astounding.

I'm prejudiced about education altogether. I think it's terribly overrated.

As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so

The seeds from Ramanujan's garden have been blowing on the wind and have been sprouting all over the landscape. [On the stimulating effects of Ramanujan's mathematical legacy.]

Of course, the English countryside is completely artificial. It was naturally a forest; they chopped down the trees and made it into what it is now: really a beautiful country.

It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true

Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.

Committees do harm merely by existing.

The average ground temperature of the Earth is impossible to measure since most of the Earth is ocean...So this average ground temperature is a fiction.

Climate change is part of the normal order of things, and we know it was happening before humans came.

Humanity looks to me like a magnificent beginning but not the final word.

If you start out with a tragic view of life, then anything since is just a bonus.

The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.

The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.

It makes very little sense to believe the output of the climate models.

The key to having an interesting life is to always say "yes" to anything crazy.

I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain.

For me, science is just a bunch of tools - it's like playing the violin.

Boiled down to one sentence, my message is the unboundedness of life and the unboundedness of human destiny.

The only way to improve the chances for finding winners is to keep all the choices open and try them all.

Computer models of the climate....[are] a very dubious business if you don't have good inputs.

And somehow mother nature manages to create this incredible biosphere, to create this incredibly rich environment of animals and plants with this amazingly small amount of data.

I think that what the machines can do, of course, is wonderful, but it's not the same as what the brain can do.

There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global.

The pain of childbirth is not remembered. It's the child that's remembered.

I am hoping that the scientists and politicians who have been blindly demonizing carbon dioxide for 37 years will one day open their eyes and look at the evidence.

The world is just - it's wonderful when you look at all the detail. It's just amazing. Nothing is boring if you look at it carefully.

We do not know how much of the environmental change is due to human activities and how much [is due] to long-term natural processes over which we have no control.

Most of what we see in the universe is dust.

As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.

The ground of science was littered with the corpses of dead unified theories.

The marketplace judges technologies by their practical effectiveness, by whether they succeed or fail to do the job they are designed to do.

The technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people.

It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.

We simply don't know yet what's going to happen to the carbon in the atmosphere.

It is not surprising that honest and well-informed experts can disagree about facts. But beyond the disagreement about facts, there is another deeper disagreement about values.

Life is nature's way to give mind oportunities it wouldn't otherwise had.