Top 120 Freeman Dyson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “New directions in science are launched by new tools much more often than by new concepts. The effect of a concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of a tool-driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explained.”

— Freeman Dyson

2. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

3. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

4. “As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.”

— Freeman Dyson

5. “The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.”

— Freeman Dyson

6. “It is better to be wrong than to be vague.”

— Freeman Dyson

7. “Technology without morality is barbarous; morality without technology is impotent.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

9. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

11. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

13. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

14. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

16. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

17. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

18. “The total disorder in the universe, as measured by the quantity that physicists call entropy, increases steadily over time. Also, the total order in the universe, as measured by the complexity and permanence of organized structures, also increases steadily over time.”

— Freeman Dyson

19. “Aviation is the branch of engineering that is least forgiving of mistakes.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

21. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

23. “The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people’s hopes.”

— Freeman Dyson

24. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

26. “The analogies between science and art are very good as long as you are talking about the creation and the performance. The creation is certainly very analogous. The aesthetic pleasure of the craftsmanship of performance is also very strong in science.”

— Freeman Dyson

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27. “The universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

30. “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?”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

32. “One of the memorable moments of my life was when Willard Libby came to Princeton with a little jar full of crystals of barium xenate. A stable compound, looking like common salt, but much heavier. This was the magic of chemistry, to see xenon trapped into a crystal.”

— Freeman Dyson

33. “All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control. Describing John von Neumann’s aspiration for the application of computers sufficiently large to solve the problems of meteorology, despite the sensitivity of the weather to small perturbations.”

— Freeman Dyson

34. “We have no reason to think that climate change is harmful if you look at the world as a whole. Most places, in fact, are better off being warmer than being colder. And historically, the really bad times for the environment and for people have been the cold periods rather than the warm periods.”

— Freeman Dyson

35. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

38. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

40. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

41. “I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized.”

— Freeman Dyson

42. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

43. “The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines.”

— Freeman Dyson

44. “Just because you see pictures of glaciers falling into the ocean doesn’t mean anything bad is happening. This is something that happens all the time. It’s part of the natural cycle of things. We know from measurements that glaciers have been melting for 200 years at least.”

— Freeman Dyson

45. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

46. “Scientifically speaking, a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring. When something ceases to be mysterious, it ceases to be of absorbing concern to scientists. Almost all the things scientists think and dream about are mysterious.”

— Freeman Dyson

47. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

49. “Our thinking is permeated by our historical myths.”

— Freeman Dyson

50. “It’s not going to be just humans colonizing space, it’s going to be life moving out from the Earth, moving it into its kingdom. And the kingdom of life, of course, is going to be the universe.”

— Freeman Dyson