A biography for Freeman Dysonhasn’t been written yet.
“It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear.”
“Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.”
“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.”
“my first recommendation to people in charge of science education is, more money for public libraries and museums. Public libraries and museums ought to be as common as schools.”
“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.”
“I like people who are working on practical things and who are working in teams. It's not so important to get the glory. It's much more important to get something that works. It's a better way to live.”
“The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.”
“There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.”
“Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.”
“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?”
“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.”