A biography for Freeman Dysonhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“Aviation is the branch of engineering that is least forgiving of mistakes.”
“We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.”
“When we look ahead to 2018, we should expect big steps forward in science to come once again from changes in style rather than from marginal improvements in technology.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe is some sense must have known that we were coming”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm.”
“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”
“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 pain of childbirth is not remembered. It's the child that's remembered.”
“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.”
“Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science.”
“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 public knows that human beings are fallible. Only people blinded by ideology fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility.”