Top 120 Freeman Dyson Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The public knows that human beings are fallible. Only people blinded by ideology fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility.”

— Freeman Dyson

102. “Committees do harm merely by existing.”

— Freeman Dyson

103. “The ethical standards of scientists must change as the scope of the good and evil caused by science has changed. In the long run, as Haldane and Einstein said, ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.”

— Freeman Dyson

104. “I’m a mathematician, basically. What I do is look around for problems where I can find useful applications for mathematics. All I do, really, is the math, and other people have the ideas.”

— Freeman Dyson

105. “It’s better to get mugged than to live a life of fear.”

— Freeman Dyson

106. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

108. “If science ceases to be a rebellion against authority, then it does not deserve the talents of our brightest children.”

— Freeman Dyson

109. “Some Western readers commonly use the Japanese word manga to mean serious comic-book literature. According to one of my Japanese friends, this usage is wrong. The word manga means “idle picture” and is used in Japan to describe collections of trivial comic-book stories. The correct word for serious comic-book literature is gekiga, meaning “dramatic picture.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

111. “I do not deny the power and the beauty of reductionist science, as exemplified in the axioms and theorems of abstract algebra... But I assert the equal power and beauty of constructive science as exemplified in Godel’s construction of an undecidable proposition...”

— Freeman Dyson

112. “My message is that science is a human activity, and the best way to understand it is to understand the individual human beings who practice it.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

114. “Science flourishes best when it uses freely all the tools at hand, unconstrained by preconceived notions of what science ought to be. Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature’s imagination is richer than ours.”

— Freeman Dyson

115. “The fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all. There’s no reason why one should be scared.”

— Freeman Dyson

116. “Many of the technologies that are now racing ahead most rapidly, replacing human workers in factories and offices with machines, making stockholders richer and workers poorer, are indeed tending to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth.”

— Freeman Dyson

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

— Freeman Dyson

118. “The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.”

— Freeman Dyson

119. “Sanity is, in essence, nothing more than the ability to live in harmony with nature’s laws.”

— Freeman Dyson

120. “It’s as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn’t a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There’s been lots more like him, and it’s a shame they don’t get Nobel Prizes.”

— Freeman Dyson

121. “Mostly I’m just writing books for the public, and so I try to describe for the public what the choices are, what they might have to expect in the future and so by warning people ahead of time maybe you have an effect.”

— Freeman Dyson

122. “It is important for long-range stability that peaceful countries be well armed and well organized in self-defense.”

— Freeman Dyson

123. “The primary difference between the classical layer and the quantum layer is that the classical layer deals with facts and the quantum layer deals with probabilities. In situations where classical laws are valid, we can predict the future by observing the past. In situations where quantum laws are valid, we can observe the past but we cannot predict the future. In the quantum layer, events are unpredictable.”

— Freeman Dyson

124. “To my mind, the history of science is most illuminating when the frailties of human actors are put into juxtaposition with the transcendence of nature’s laws.”

— Freeman Dyson

125. “The cult of military obedience and the cult of weapons of mass destruction are the two great follies of the modern age.”

— Freeman Dyson

126. “The conservative has little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires.”

— Freeman Dyson

127. “If it should turn out that the whole of physical reality can be described by a finite set of equations, I would be disappointed. I would feel that the Creator had been uncharacteristically lacking in imagination.”

— Freeman Dyson

128. “Any society which idolizes soldiers is tainted with a collective insanity and is likely in the end to come to grief.”

— Freeman Dyson

129. “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.”

— Freeman Dyson

130. “Nonviolence is often the path of wisdom, but not always. Love and passive resistance are wonderfully effective weapons against some kinds of tyranny, but not against all.”

— Freeman Dyson

131. “Life had to invent death to evolve.”

— Freeman Dyson

132. “The craft of writing software will not become obsolete. And the craft of using soft ware creatively is flourishing even more than the craft of writing it. The availability of software and.”

— Freeman Dyson

133. “The international community of scientists may help to abolish war by setting an example to the world of practical cooperation extending across barriers of nationality, language, and culture.”

— Freeman Dyson

134. “Gandhi’s satyagraha was an effective weapon for a subject people to use against their oppressors, but his followers discarded it promptly as soon as they gained control of their own government and stood in the oppressors’ shoes.”

— Freeman Dyson

135. “Today I discovered a little theorem which gave me some intense moments of pleasure. It is beautiful and fell into my hand like a jewel from the sky.”

— Freeman Dyson

136. “Scientists who become icons must not only be geniuses but also performers, playing to the crowd and enjoying public acclaim.”

— Freeman Dyson

137. “The debacle of European pacifism has at least one clear lesson to teach us: pacifists, if they are to be effective in the modern world, must be as wholehearted and as brave as Gandhi.”

— Freeman Dyson

138. “It is impossible to make real progress in technology without gambling.”

— Freeman Dyson