Quotes by Fred Hoyle

“I am an atheist, but as far as blowing up the world in a nuclear war goes, I tell them not to worry.”

“There is a coherent plan to the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for.”

“Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.”

“It is the true nature of mankind to learn from mistakes not from example.”

“It is the true nature of mankind to learn from mistakes not from example.”

“We now come to the question of applying the observational tests to earlier theories. These theories were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a...”

“Big Bang theory”

“It is in the world of ideas and in the relation of his brain to the universe itself that the superiority of Man lies. The rise of Man may justly be described as an adventure in ideas.”

“It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not corr...”

“I do not believe that anything really worthwhile will come out of the exploration of the slag heap that constitutes the surface of the moon...Nobody should imagine that the enormous financial budge...”

“We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over m...”

“Life cannot have had a random beginning … The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 1040,000, an outrageou...”

“Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics on which...”

“The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”

“The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.”

“A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 7...”

“Between the ages of five and nine I was almost perpetually at war with the educational system. ...As soon as I learned from my mother that there was there was a place called school that I must atte...”

“The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constit...”

“To achieve anything really worthwhile in research it is necessary to go against the opinions of one's fellows. To do so successfully, not merely becoming a crackpot, requires fine judgement, especi...”

“When I was young, the old regarded me as an outrageous young fellow, and now that I'm old the young regard me as an outrageous old fellow.”