The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.

So long as you have courage and a sense of humor, it is never too late to start life afresh.

In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.

There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global.

In religion, you're supposed to be somehow in touch with something deep and full of mysteries.

Computer models of the climate....[are] a very dubious business if you don't have good inputs.

I think we're doing pretty well. It's clear the media, of course, always gives you the bad news.

Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science.

As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.

The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.

That's what I learned from World War II. Things are always more complicated than most people believe.

Climate change is part of the normal order of things, and we know it was happening before humans came.

Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich.

The only way to improve the chances for finding winners is to keep all the choices open and try them all.

Some of my friends like to keep science and religion together, but I certainly like to keep them separate.

Boiled down to one sentence, my message is the unboundedness of life and the unboundedness of human destiny.

If you want to have a program for moving out into the universe, you have to think in centuries not in decades.

In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses.

Everything in my life was luck. The key to having an interesting life is to always say "yes" to anything crazy.

There is no way to find the best design except to try out as many designs as possible and discard the failures.

I think that what the machines can do, of course, is wonderful, but it's not the same as what the brain can do.

The fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn't scare me at all. There's no reason why one should be scared.

I think the biggest misconception is that everybody has to learn mathematics. That seems to be a complete mistake.

Mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our understanding.

To give us room to explore the varieties of mind and body into which our genome can evolve, one planet is not enough.

The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm.

Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague.

[John Wheeler] rejuvenated general relativity; he made it an experimental subject and took it away from the mathematicians

If we want to go to space with humans, that's for fun not for science. Human adventures in space are just sporting events.

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

The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe.

Vegetation is really controlling what happens...whereas the emphasis in the climate models has always been on the atmosphere.

I mean science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly.

Do not imagine that you have to know everything before you can do anything. My own best work was done when I was most ignorant.

If the tools are bad, nature's voice is muffled. If the tools are good, nature will give us a clear answer to a clear question.

That's the beautiful thing about science - that it's all about things we don't understand, not just the things we do understand.

The world is just - it's wonderful when you look at all the detail. It's just amazing. Nothing is boring if you look at it carefully.

We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.

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

We cannot hope to either understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.

Science and religion are, of course, two different ways of looking at the universe; and it's the same universe with two different windows.

We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.

That's, of course, the beautiful thing about science - that it's all about things we don't understand, not just the things we do understand.

I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.

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

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

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?

That was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan. He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover.

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

To me, mathematics is like playing the violin. Some people can do it - others can't. If you don't have it, then there's no point in pretending.

Share This Page