Quote

It is in the long run essential to the growth of any new and high civilization that small groups of men can escape from their neighbors and from their government, to go and live as they please in the wilderness. A truly isolated, small, and creative society will never again be possible on this planet.

Freeman Dyson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Freeman Dyson
Age: 96 †
Born: 1923
Born: December 15
Died: 2020
Died: February 28
Mathematician
Nuclear Physicist
Physicist
Professor
Theoretical Physicist
Crowthorne
Berkshire
Freeman John Dyson
Freeman J. Dyson
Society
Walking
Neighbor
Running
Groups
Essential
Government
Please
Essentials
Live
Growth
Planet
Long
Small
Planets
Neighbors
Never
Creative
Moon
Isolated
Men
Possible
Civilization
Wilderness
High
Truly
Escape

More quotes by Freeman Dyson

Image
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.
Freeman Dyson
Image
The world is just - it's wonderful when you look at all the detail. It's just amazing.
Freeman Dyson
Image
The history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were impossible.
Freeman Dyson
Image
It's us that's really amazing. As far as I can see, our concentration of different abilities in one species - there's nothing I can see that in this Darwinian evolution that could've done that. So it seems to be a miracle of some sort.
Freeman Dyson
Image
Plasma seems to have the kinds of properties one would like for life. It's somewhat like liquid water--unpredictable and thus able to behave in an enormously complex fashion. It could probably carry as much information as DNA does. It has at least the potential for organizing itself in interesting ways.
Freeman Dyson
Image
Now, as Mandelbrot points out, ... Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians. The 19th-century mathematicians may not have been lacking in imagination, but Nature was not. The same pathological structures that the mathematicians invented to break loose from 19th-century naturalism turn out to be inherent in familiar objects all around us.
Freeman Dyson
Image
For me, science is just a bunch of tools - it's like playing the violin.
Freeman Dyson
Image
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
Image
When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories.
Freeman Dyson
Image
The pain of childbirth is not remembered. It's the child that's remembered.
Freeman Dyson
Image
If you're in the business world, that's what's expected: You should go bust and then start again on something else. So it's a much more relaxed kind of a culture. It's also competitive, but not in such a vicious way. I think the academic world is actually much more destructive of young people.
Freeman Dyson
Image
Aviation is the branch of engineering that is least forgiving of mistakes.
Freeman Dyson
Image
If you go to London now, not everything is beautiful, but it's amazingly better than it was. And the Thames is certainly a lot better: There are fish in the Thames.
Freeman Dyson
Image
If we want to go to space with humans, that's for fun not for science. Human adventures in space are just sporting events.
Freeman Dyson
Image
There are two different ways of looking at the universe and it's the same universe with two different windows. The science window gives you a view of the world, and the religion window gives you a totally different view. You can't look at both of them at the same time, but they're both true.
Freeman Dyson
Image
The fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn't scare me at all. There's no reason why one should be scared.
Freeman Dyson
Image
I think we're doing pretty well. It's clear the media, of course, always gives you the bad news.
Freeman Dyson
Image
The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.
Freeman Dyson
Image
So long as you have courage and a sense of humor, it is never too late to start life afresh.
Freeman Dyson
Image
We won't really understand the brain until we can make models of it which are analog rather than digital, which nobody seems to be trying very much.
Freeman Dyson