Freeman Dyson Thinking Quotations

You ask: what is the meaning or purpose of life? I can only answer with another question: do you think we are wise enough to read God's mind?

The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.

I think that what the machines can do, of course, is wonderful, but it's not the same as what the brain can do.

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.

For me too, the periodic table was a passion. ... As a boy, I stood in front of the display for hours, thinking how wonderful it was that each of those metal foils and jars of gas had its own distinct personality.

[On Richard P. Feynman's live demonstration of the rigidity of the O-rings when cold that doomed the space shuttle Challenger, killing seven astronauts:] The public saw with their own eyes how science is done, how a great scientist thinks with his hands, how nature gives a clear answer when a scientist asks her a clear question.

I think science and religion should be separate.

For some days I quietly worked out in my own mind the metaphysics of Cosmic Unity. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it was the living truth. It was logically incontrovertible. It provided for the first time a firm foundation for ethics. It offered mankind the radical change of heart and mind that was our only hope of peace at a time of desperate danger. Only one small problem remained. I must find a way to convert the world to my way of thinking.

I think the biggest misconception is that everybody has to learn mathematics. That seems to be a complete mistake.

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.

I think it's a big mistake to decide too soon what you're going to do with your life.

If you're in the business world, that's what's expected: You should go bust and then start again on something else. So it's a much more relaxed kind of a culture. It's also competitive, but not in such a vicious way. I think the academic world is actually much more destructive of young people.

I'm prejudiced about education altogether. I think it's terribly overrated.

As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.

Our thinking is permeated by our historical myths

Scientifically speaking, a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring. When something ceases to be mysterious, it ceases to be of absorbing concern to scientists. Almost all the things scientists think and dream about are mysterious.

If you want to have a program for moving out into the universe, you have to think in centuries not in decades.

I think we're doing pretty well. It's clear the media, of course, always gives you the bad news.

Some things go better than you expected, other things go worse, so I'm... I think the only sensible thing is just to wait and see and what I'm doing when I'm writing books - I'm not doing science so much anymore.

I think it's much better to have your eyes open, but on the other hand, of course it can do harm if you tell people look, there's all these terrible things you can do and then some idiot may go ahead and do it.

I think the fact that Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World and talked about anthrax bombs probably helped because at least we... people had the understanding before the war began that's something we didn't want to get into.

I grew up in England and we spent most of the time on Latin and Greek and very little on science, and I think that was good because it meant we didn't get turned off. It was... Science was something we did for fun and not because we had to.