Quotes from Freeman Dyson

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain.

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.

The language that nature speaks is the same language that we invented for mathematics. That's just an amazing piece of luck, which we don't understand.

Everything in my life was luck.

I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce.

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.

Unfortunately, things are different in climate science because the arguments have become heavily politicised. To say that the dogmas are wrong has become politically incorrect.

It's us that's really amazing.

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

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.

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.

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

Mathematics is really an art, not a science.

You could say science also is an art.

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?

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

In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses.

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