Quotes By 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.

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.

The biologists have essentially been pushed aside. Al Gore's just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.

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

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.

Successful technologies often begin as hobbies. Jacques Cousteau invented scuba diving because he enjoyed exploring caves. The Wright brothers invented flying as a relief from the monotony of their normal business of selling and repairing bicycles.

The marketplace judges technologies by their practical effectiveness, by whether they succeed or fail to do the job they are designed to do.

If you start out with a tragic view of life, then anything since is just a bonus.

The public knows that human beings are fallible. Only people blinded by ideology fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility.

Lucky individuals in each generation find technology appropriate to their needs.

The pain of childbirth is not remembered. It's the child that's remembered.

It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.