Top 532 Quotes & Sayings by Stephen Hawking - Page 5

Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this.

Do you ever wonder how much deeper the ocean would be without sponges?

The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.

If at first you don't succeed, try management.

One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer.

The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.

The universe doesn't allow perfection.

The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.

Its a crazy world out there. Be curious.

Success is a relative term. It brings so many relatives.

Although I cannot move, and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind, I am free.

When I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my pistol.

I think the human race doesn't have a future if we don't go into space. We need to expand our horizons beyond planet Earth if we are to have a long-term future. We cannot remain looking inward at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. We need to look outward to the wider universe.

So when people ask me if I believe God created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn't exist before the Big Bang, so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It's like asking for directions to the edge of the earth; the earth is a sphere, it doesn't have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.

Plagiarism saves time.

There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.

Once I wept for I had no shoes. Then I met a man with no feet, so I took his shoes. I mean, it wasn't as if he was going to need them.

Nothing is fool-proof to a sufficiently talented fool.

I would rather be right than rigorous.

I’m not religious in the normal sense. I believe the universe is governed by the laws of science. The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws.

To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.

Nuclear weapons need large facilities, but genetic engineering can be done in a small lab. You can't regulate every lab in the world. The danger is that either by accident or design, we create a virus that destroys us.

Is god omnipotent ? If he is, can he create a rock so heavy he can't lift it ?

When the going gets tough, the tough take a coffee break.

The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression. It may have had survival advantage in caveman days, to get more food, territory or a partner with whom to reproduce, but now it threatens to destroy us all.

If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?

One can see from space how the human race has changed the Earth. Nearly all of the available land has been cleared of forest and is now used for agriculture or urban development. The polar icecaps are shrinking and the desert areas are increasing. At night, the Earth is no longer dark, but large areas are lit up. All of this is evidence that human exploitation of the planet is reaching a critical limit. But human demands and expectations are ever-increasing. We cannot continue to pollute the atmosphere, poison the ocean and exhaust the land. There isn't any more available.

I'm here to chew gum and kick some ass, and I'm all out of gum.

If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe as we spread into space. If we are the only intellegent beings in the galaxy we should make sure we survive and continue. . . . Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth but to spread out into space. We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space.

Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations.

The laws of science do not distinguish between the past and the future.

Science can explain the universe without the need for a Creator.

If the government is covering up knowledge of aliens, they are doing a better job of it than they do at anything else.

The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological-technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science. Clearly, no scientist better represents those advances than Albert Einstein: TIME's Person of the Century.

There should be a better way to start a day than waking up every morning.

The idea that we are alone in the universe seems to me completely implausible and arrogant, considering the number of planets and stars that we know exist, it's extremely unlikely that we are the only form of evolved life.

Ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.

In the last 200 years the population of our planet has grown exponentially, at a rate of 1.9% per year. If it continued at this rate, with the population doubling every 40 years, by 2600 we would all be standing literally shoulder to shoulder.

If what we regard as real depends on our theory, how can we make reality the basis of our philosophy? But we cannot distinguish what is real about the universe without a theory. It makes no sense to ask if it corresponds to reality, because we do not know what reality is independent of a theory.

Whether you want to uncover the secrets of the universe, or you just want to pursue a career in the 21st century, basic computer programming is an essential skill to learn

Government works best under the glare of public scrutiny. Absent such scrutiny, abuses occur.

While there's life, there is hope.

Love the neighbor. But don't get caught.

We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years, but if we want to continue, our future is in space.

A picture is worth a thousand words...and uses up a thousand times the memory.

A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: it must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.

I have experimental evidence that time travel is not possible.

It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. Its a crazy world out there. Be curious.

The meaning in life is not out there but inbetween our ears. In many ways this makes us the lords of creation.

There is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at a new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap.

It's clearly possible for a something to acquire higher intelligence than its ancestors: we evolved to be smarter than our ape-like ancestors, and Einstein was smarter than his parents.

What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.

I may contradict myself, but at least I don't contradict myself.

Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science.

What I meant by 'we would know the mind of God' is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God. Which there isn't. I'm an atheist.

I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen.

Latest survey shows that 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the world's population.

So long as the Universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the Universe is really completely self-contained, it would have neither beginning or end, it would simply be. What place then for a creator?

Though we feel we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets.