Top 120 Freeman Dyson Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Sometimes we talked about the nature of the human soul and about the Cosmic Unity of souls that I had believed in so firmly when I was 15 years old. My mother did not like the phrase Cosmic Unity. It was too pretentious. She preferred to call it a world soul.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

53. “Thanks to the discoveries of astronomers in the twentieth century, we now know that the heat death is a myth. The heat death can never happen, and there is no paradox.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

57. “A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice. In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

59. “The pain of childbirth is not remembered. It’s the child that’s remembered.”

— Freeman Dyson

60. “If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.”

— Freeman Dyson

61. “There is nothing so big nor so crazy that one out of a million technological societies may not feel itself driven to do, provided it is physically possible.”

— Freeman Dyson

62. “Successful technologies often begin as hobbies. Jacques Cousteau invented scuba diving because he enjoyed exploring caves. The Wright brothers invented flying as a relief from the monotony of their normal business of selling and repairing bicycles.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

64. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

65. “Most of what we see in the universe is dust.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

68. “If the tools are bad, nature’s voice is muffled. If the tools are good, nature will give us a clear answer to a clear question.”

— Freeman Dyson

69. “Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people.”

— Freeman Dyson

70. “Most of the papers which are submitted to the Physical Review are rejected, not because it is impossible to understand them, but because it is possible. Those which are impossible to understand are usually published.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

72. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

73. “A model is such a fascinating toy that you fall in love with your creation.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

77. “I like people who are working on practical things and who are working in teams. It’s not so important to get the glory. It’s much more important to get something that works. It’s a better way to live.”

— Freeman Dyson

78. “What the world needs is a small, compact, flexible fusion technology that could make electricity where and when it is needed. The existing fusion program is leading to a huge source of centralized power, at a price that nobody except a government can afford.”

— Freeman Dyson

79. “Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

82. “I don’t know, but I think it’s quite possible that the more science you teach kids in school the more it turns them off, so I don’t know. I mean you never can tell which way it will go.”

— Freeman Dyson

83. “The biologists have essentially been pushed aside. Al Gore’s just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.”

— Freeman Dyson

84. “I grew up in England at a time when England was winning Nobel Prizes right and left. I mean it was amazing how many Nobel Prizes England was winning in chemistry and physics and biology and all the sciences and at that time the teaching of science in the schools was really lousy.”

— Freeman Dyson

85. “The important thing is that we now have the tools to sequence all kinds of animals and plants and microbes – as well as humans. It is not important that we didn’t actually finish the human sequence yet.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

87. “Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

90. “Life is nature’s way to give mind oportunities it wouldn’t otherwise had.”

— Freeman Dyson

91. “If you don’t have a nasty obituary you probably didn’t matter.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

93. “I mean science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it’s blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

95. “Younger people have so many opportunities. I don’t see any pessimism among them.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

97. “I think it’s much better to have your eyes open, but on the other hand, of course it can do harm if you tell people look, there’s all these terrible things you can do and then some idiot may go ahead and do it.”

— Freeman Dyson

98. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

99. “Lucky individuals in each generation find technology appropriate to their needs.”

— Freeman Dyson

100. “We simply don’t know yet what’s going to happen to the carbon in the atmosphere.”

— Freeman Dyson