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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

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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
Live
Growth
Planet
Long
Small
Planets
Neighbors
Never
Creative
Moon
Isolated
Men
Possible
Civilization
Wilderness
High
Truly
Escape
Society
Walking
Neighbor
Running
Groups
Essential
Government
Please
Essentials

More quotes by Freeman Dyson

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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.
Freeman Dyson
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Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious dogma or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute.
Freeman Dyson
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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.
Freeman Dyson
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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
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It is not surprising that honest and well-informed experts can disagree about facts. But beyond the disagreement about facts, there is another deeper disagreement about values.
Freeman Dyson
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Science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly. I mean World War I was a horrible war and it was mostly the fault of science, so that was in a way a very bad time for science, but on the other hand we were winning all these Nobel Prizes.
Freeman Dyson
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As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.
Freeman Dyson
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For me, science is just a bunch of tools - it's like playing the violin.
Freeman Dyson
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I'm prejudiced about education altogether. I think it's terribly overrated.
Freeman Dyson
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Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science.
Freeman Dyson
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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
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The important thing is that we now have the tools to sequence all kinds of animals and plants and microbes - as well as humans. It is not important that we didn't actually finish the human sequence yet.
Freeman Dyson
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I don't know, but I think it's quite possible that the more science you teach kids in school the more it turns them off, so I don't know. I mean you never can tell which way it will go.
Freeman Dyson
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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.
Freeman Dyson
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We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.
Freeman Dyson
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Of course, the English countryside is completely artificial. It was naturally a forest they chopped down the trees and made it into what it is now: really a beautiful country.
Freeman Dyson
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The only way to improve the chances for finding winners is to keep all the choices open and try them all.
Freeman Dyson
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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
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Intelligence may indeed be a benign influence creating isolated groups of philosopher-kings far apart in the heavens... On the other hand, intelligence may be a cancer of purposeless technological exploitation, sweeping across a galaxy as irresistibly as it has swept across our own planet.
Freeman Dyson
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The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.
Freeman Dyson