Top 300 Stephen Hawking Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “When I get to heaven I’m gonna find the guy in charge of the weather and kick his rear.”

— Stephen Hawking

252. “I would rather be right than rigorous.”

— Stephen Hawking

253. “Computer viruses are alive.”

— Stephen Hawking

254. “One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer.”

— Stephen Hawking

255. “The life we have on Earth must have spontaneously generated itself. It must therefore be possible for life to generate spontaneously elsewhere in the universe.”

— Stephen Hawking

256. “If any one of about 40 physical qualities had more than slightly different values, life as we know it could not exist...”

— Stephen Hawking

257. “We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years, but if we want to continue, our future is in space.”

— Stephen Hawking

258. “We are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. But I’m an optimist.”

— Stephen Hawking

259. “Over a very small number of rolls of the dice, the uncertainty principle is very important.”

— Stephen Hawking

260. “People think I’m a Simpsons character.”

— Stephen Hawking

261. “It’s clearly possible for a something to acquire higher intelligence than its ancestors: we evolved to be smarter than our ape-like ancestors, and Einstein was smarter than his parents.”

— Stephen Hawking

262. “Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?”

— Stephen Hawking

263. “We explore because we are human.”

— Stephen Hawking

264. “There is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at a new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap.”

— Stephen Hawking

265. “I may contradict myself, but at least I don’t contradict myself.”

— Stephen Hawking

266. “I enjoy all forms of music – pop, classical and opera.”

— Stephen Hawking

267. “It is tribute to how far we have come in theoretical physics that it now takes enormous machines and a great deal of money to perform experiments whose results we can not predict.”

— Stephen Hawking

268. “Or in other words, why does disorder increase in the same direction of time as that in which the universe expands?”

— Stephen Hawking

269. “All that my work has shown is that you don’t have to say that the way the universe began was the personal whim of God.”

— Stephen Hawking

270. “More often than politicians, but not as often as they should.”

— Stephen Hawking

271. “When I was first diagnosed with ALS, I was given two years to live. Now 45 years later, I am doing pretty well.”

— Stephen Hawking

272. “I am discounting reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?”

— Stephen Hawking

273. “Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can’t be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.”

— Stephen Hawking

274. “Science can lift people out of poverty and cure disease. That, in turn, will reduce civil unrest.”

— Stephen Hawking

275. “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”

— Stephen Hawking

276. “I’m a child myself, in the sense that I’m still looking. Children are fascinated by black holes and ask me questions. I find they soon get the idea if it is explained in nontechnical language.”

— Stephen Hawking

277. “A model is a good model if first it interprets a wide range of observations in terms of a simple and elegant model, and second if the model makes definite predictions that can be tested, and possibly falsified, by observation.”

— Stephen Hawking

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

278. “There is no way that we can predict the weather six months ahead beyond giving the seasonal average.”

— Stephen Hawking

279. “There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end ofthe search for the ultimate laws of nature.”

— Stephen Hawking

280. “Time travel was once considered scientific heresy, and I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a ‘crank.’”

— Stephen Hawking

281. “Now, radical forward thinking is offering hope for the future: Replacement body parts to order. A team of scientists in California believe that if you can design them on a computer, you should be able to print them out.”

— Stephen Hawking

282. “A lot of prizes have been awarded for showing the universe is not as simple as we might have thought.”

— Stephen Hawking

283. “The progress of the human race in understanding the universe has established a small corner of order in an increasingly disordered universe.”

— Stephen Hawking

284. “In Britain, like most of the developed world, stem-cell research is regarded as a great opportunity. America will be left behind if it doesn’t change policy.”

— Stephen Hawking

285. “No one can resist the idea of a crippled genius.”

— Stephen Hawking

286. “What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn’t prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.”

— Stephen Hawking

287. “If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in broad principle by everyone. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist.”

— Stephen Hawking

288. “You can’t regulate every lab in the world.”

— Stephen Hawking

289. “Science fiction can be exciting and very gripping, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the universe in which we live.”

— Stephen Hawking

290. “In effect, we have redefined the task of science to be the discovery of laws that will enable us to predict events up to the limits set by the uncertainty principle.”

— Stephen Hawking

291. “Not to take this web of dualities as a sign we are on the right track would be a bit like believing that God put fossils into the rocks in order to mislead Darwin about the evolution of life.”

— Stephen Hawking

292. “All my adult life people have been helping me.”

— Stephen Hawking

293. “Maybe my viriety is due to bad absorption of vitamins.”

— Stephen Hawking

294. “I don’t want to write an autobiography because I would become public property with no privacy left.”

— Stephen Hawking

295. “One could say: “The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.” The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.”

— Stephen Hawking

296. “I don’t have much positive to say about motor neuron disease, but it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I still could do. I’m happier now than before I developed the condition.”

— Stephen Hawking

297. “The media need superheroes in science just as in every sphere of life, but there is really a continuous range of abilities with no clear dividing line.”

— Stephen Hawking

298. “Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty.”

— Stephen Hawking

299. “I’m the archetype of a disabled genius, or should I say a physically challenged genius, to be politically correct. At least I’m obviously physically challenged. Whether I’m a genius is more open to doubt.”

— Stephen Hawking

300. “The downside of my celebrity is that I cannot go anywhere in the world without being recognized. It is not enough for me to wear dark sunglasses and a wig. The wheelchair gives me away.”

— Stephen Hawking