Freeman Dyson

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

It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.

Biology is now bigger than physics as measured by the size of budgets by the size of the workforce or by the output of major discoveries and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty first century.

Just because you see pictures of glaciers falling into the ocean doesn't mean anything bad is happening. This is something that happens all the time. It's part of the natural cycle of things. We know from measurements that glaciers have been melting for 200 years at least.

Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century.

Younger people have so many opportunities. I don't see any pessimism among them.

Nothing is boring if you look at carefully.

The biologists have essentially been pushed aside. Al Gore's just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.

I don't think of myself predicting things. I'm expressing possibilities. Things that could happen. To a large extent it's a question of how badly people want them to.

The pain of childbirth is not remembered. It's the child that's remembered.

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. There are no prima donnas in engineering.

Climate change is part of the normal order of things and we know it was happening before humans came.

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 awaiting the arrival of intelligence.

It is not surprising that honest and well informed experts can disagree about facts. But beyond the disagreement about facts there is another deeper disagreement about values.

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

The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models. They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.

Many of the technologies that are now racing ahead most rapidly, replacing human workers in factories and offices with machines, making stockholders richer and workers poorer, are indeed tending to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth.

Aviation is the branch of engineering that is least forgiving of mistakes.

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 normal business of selling and repairing bicycles.

The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don't have PhDs.

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

Sanity is, in essence, nothing more than the ability to live in harmony with nature's laws.

I have the freedom to do what I want... bright people to talk to every day.

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.

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 imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people.

There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.

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?

It's not going to be just humans colonizing space, it's going to be life moving out from the Earth, moving it into its kingdom. And the kingdom of life, of course, is going to be the universe.

So long as you have courage and a sense of humor, it is never too late to start life afresh.

It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear.

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