Freeman Dyson

“The world is full of people who are grabbing and self-seeking. So you have to be one of the people who is giving.”

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

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

“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.”

“It's just as sloppy to be an optimist as it is to be a pessimist.”

“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.”

“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 be safer than one.”

“For a physicist, mathematics is not just a tool but also a source of guidance and inspiration.”

“I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist.”

“The laws of physics are a canvas, not a straitjacket.”

“The great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”

“It is better to be wrong than to be vague.”

“The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove.”

“The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.”

“Science is my territory, but science is not the only territory. The world of art and literature and human institutions is equally important.”