Quotes from Freeman Dyson

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

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

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.

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

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 better to get mugged than to live a life of fear.

No matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness, and memory.

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.

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.

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

Life is nature's way to give mind oportunities it wouldn't otherwise had.

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 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.

Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.

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

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

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

The key to having an interesting life is to always say "yes" to anything crazy.

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.

The world of science and the world of literature have much in common. Each is an international club, helping to tie mankind together across barriers of nationality, race and language. I have been doubly lucky, being accepted as a member of both.

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.

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.

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

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.