Freeman Dyson

If you start out with a tragic view of life, then anything since is just a bonus.

The marketplace judges technologies by their practical effectiveness, by whether they succeed or fail to do the job they are designed to do.

Lucky individuals in each generation find technology appropriate to their needs.

The technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people.

The fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn't scare me at all. There's no reason why one should be scared.

What the world needs is a small, compact, flexible fusion technology that could make electricity where and when it is needed. The existing fusion program is leading to a huge source of centralized power, at a price that nobody except a government can afford.

It's as great a part of the human adventure to invent things as to understand them. John Randall wasn't a great scientist, but he was a great inventor. There's been lots more like him, and it's a shame they don't get Nobel Prizes.

I don't believe in technological determinism, especially not in biology and medicine. We have strong laws to keep doctors from monkeying around with humans that will remain in place. It's simply not true that everything that is technologically possible gets done.

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

Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm a mathematician, basically. What I do is look around for problems where I can find useful applications for mathematics. All I do, really, is the math, and other people have the ideas.

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.