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Quotes by Freeman Dyson

A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice. In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.
– Freeman Dyson
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. There are no prima donnas in engineering.
– Freeman Dyson
If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.
– Freeman Dyson
It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.
– Freeman Dyson
It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear.
– Freeman Dyson
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.
– Freeman Dyson
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.
– Freeman Dyson
The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.
– Freeman Dyson
There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.
– Freeman Dyson
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?
– Freeman Dyson
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.
– Freeman Dyson
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.
– Freeman Dyson
Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science.
– Freeman Dyson
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.
– Freeman Dyson
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.
– Freeman Dyson
The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.
– Freeman Dyson
Lucky individuals in each generation find technology appropriate to their needs.
– Freeman Dyson
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.
– Freeman Dyson
I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized.
– Freeman Dyson
I have the freedom to do what I want... bright people to talk to every day.
– Freeman Dyson
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.
– Freeman Dyson