Freeman Dyson Quotes

The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

Mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our understanding.

Nothing is boring if you look at carefully.

In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be right.

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

Science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

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 history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were impossible.

The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes. If the air were not constantly stirred by convection currents and winds, the corn would stop growing.

As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.

Do not imagine that you have to know everything before you can do anything. My own best work was done when I was most ignorant.

Everything in my life was luck. The key to having an interesting life is to always say "yes" to anything crazy.

In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.

CO2 is so beneficial...it would be crazy to try to reduce it

The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm.

Technology without morality is barbarous; morality without technology is impotent.

When the great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in muddled, incomplete and confusing form. ... For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.

Atoms are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe is also weird, with its laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it passes beyond the scale of our comprehension.

Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious dogma or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute.

Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague.

The media always tries to make everything into a disaster, but it's mostly rubbish.

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.

Committees do harm merely by existing.

To me, mathematics is like playing the violin. Some people can do it - others can't. If you don't have it, then there's no point in pretending.

Boiled down to one sentence, my message is the unboundedness of life and the unboundedness of human destiny.