Quotes by Freeman Dyson

“my first recommendation to people in charge of science education is, more money for public libraries and museums. Public libraries and museums ought to be as common as schools.”

“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 a...”

“When we look ahead to 2018, we should expect big steps forward in science to come once again from changes in style rather than from marginal improvements in technology.”

“We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.”

“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. Nobody knows who inve...”

“It is our task, both in science and in society at large, to prove the conventional wisdom wrong and to make our unpredictable dreams come true”

“The essential fact which emerges ... is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs ( of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the s...”

“Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.”

“A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible.”

“I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe is some sense must have known tha...”

“The beauty in the genome is of course that it's so small. The human genome is only on the order of a gigabyte of data...which is a tiny little database. If you take the entire living biosphere, tha...”

“Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science.”

“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.”

“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 ...”

“I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big ...”

“Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagi...”

“Successful technologies often begin as hobbies. Jacques Cousteau invented scuba diving because he enjoyed exploring caves. The Wright brothers invented flying as a relief from the monotony of their...”

“It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.”

“Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.”

“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 s...”