"In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad."
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Freeman Dyson quotes (page 2 of 12)
228 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"So long as you have courage and a sense of humor, it is never too late to start life afresh."
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"The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. ... It was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York."
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"In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses."
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"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."
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"The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple."
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"The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes."
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"We have these amazing gifts of music and mathematics and painting and Olympic running. I mean, we're the animal that is best of all the animals at long-distance running. Why? It is quite amazing. Superfluous gifts you don't really need to survive."
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"CO2 is so beneficial...it would be crazy to try to reduce it"
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"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."
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"It is better to be wrong than to be vague."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Walking the streets of Tokyo with Hawking in his wheelchair ... I felt as if I were taking a walk through Galilee with Jesus Christ [as] crowds of Japanese silently streamed after us, stretching out their hands to touch Hawking's wheelchair. ... The crowds had streamed after Einstein [on Einstein's visit to Japan in 1922] as they streamed after Hawking seventy years later. ... They showed exquisite choice in their heroes. ... Somehow they understood that Einstein and Hawking were not just great scientists, but great human beings."
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"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."
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"The whole point of science is that most of it is uncertain. That's why science is exciting--because we don't know. Science is all about things we don't understand. The public, of course, imagines science is just a set of facts. But it's not. Science is a process of exploring, which is always partial. We explore, and we find out things that we understand. We find out things we thought we understood were wrong. That's how it makes progress."
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"Science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries."
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"I think that the artificial-intelligence people are making a lot of noise recently, claiming that artificial intelligence is making huge progress and we're going to be outstripped by the machines. But, in my view, this whole field is based on a misconception. I think the brain is analog, whereas the machines are digital. They really are different. So I think that what the machines can do, of course, is wonderful, but it's not the same as what the brain can do."
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"It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment."
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"We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice."
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