"Thirty years ago I was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, and given two and a half years to live. I have always wondered how they could be so precise about the half."
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Quote collection
Stephen Hawking quotes (page 11 of 22)
421 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"Using e-mail, I can communicate with scientists all over the world."
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"The initial configuration of the universe may have been chosen by God, or it may itself have been determined by the laws of science. In either case, it would seem that everything in the universe would then be determined by evolution according to the laws of science, so it is difficult to see how we can be masters of our fate."
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"Disability can be no handicap."
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"I am damned if I'm going to die before I have unraveled more of the universe"
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"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."
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"Please join me in applauding the ESA - European Space Agency’s historic efforts with the Rosetta Mission and landing a spacecraft on rotating comet. It may seem like a work of fiction, but it is very real, very impressive, and will help us to further uncover the mysteries surrounding the formation of the solar system. They made a beautiful short film using an imaginary landscape to illustrate today’s historic feat."
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"Although September 11 was horrible, it didn't threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear weapons do."
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"I think the next century will be the century of complexity."
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"When something is made idiot proof, they will just make better idiots."
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"It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years."
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"Government works best under the glare of public scrutiny. Absent such scrutiny, abuses occur."
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"Nuclear weapons need large facilities, but genetic engineering can be done in a small lab. You can't regulate every lab in the world. The danger is that either by accident or design, we create a virus that destroys us."
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"Never put off the work till tomorrow what you can put off today."
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"There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made out of antiparticles. However, if you ever meet your antiself, don't shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light."
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"The universe does not behave according to our pre-conceived ideas. It continues to surprise us."
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"We should seek the greatest value of our action."
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"I am discounting the reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?"
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"Bodies like the earth are not made to move on curved orbits by a force called gravity; instead, they follow the nearest thing to a straight path in a curved space, which is called a geodesic. A geodesic is the shortest (or longest) path between two nearby points."
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