Top 100 Stephen Hawking Quotes
#1. Or in other words, why does disorder increase in the same direction of time as that in which the universe expands?
Stephen Hawking
#2. I am in touch with a company that hopes to replicate my voice. However, they are not replicating my original voice - if they did that, I would sound like a man in his 20s, which would be very strange! They are actually trying to replicate the synthesizer that sits on my wheelchair.
Stephen Hawking
#3. In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.
Stephen Hawking
#4. God is the name people give to the reason we are here. But I think that reason is the laws of physics rather than someone with whom one can have a personal relationship. An impersonal God.
Stephen Hawking
#5. Not only does God play dice but ... he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.
Stephen Hawking
#7. We lived in a tall, narrow Victorian house, which my parents had bought very cheaply during the war, when everyone thought London was going to be bombed flat. In fact, a V-2 rocket landed a few houses away from ours. I was away with my mother and sister at the time, but my father was in the house.
Stephen Hawking
#8. 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.
Stephen Hawking
#9. We think we have solved the mystery of creation. Maybe we should patent the universe and charge everyone royalties for their existence.
Stephen Hawking
#10. Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.
Stephen Hawking
#11. So Einstein was wrong when he said, "God does not play dice." Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen.
Stephen Hawking
#12. Just like a computer, we must remember things in the order in which entropy increases. This makes the second law of thermodynamics almost trivial. Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases. You can't have a safer bet than that!
Stephen Hawking
#13. I regard the afterlife to be a fairy story for people that are afraid of the dark
Stephen Hawking
#14. Many badly needed goals, like fusion and cancer cure, would be achieved much sooner if we invested more.
Stephen Hawking
#17. We create history by our observation, rather than history creating us.
Stephen Hawking
#18. The media need superheroes in science just as in every sphere of life, but there is really a continuous range of abilities with no clear dividing line.
Stephen Hawking
#19. God not only plays dice, He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.
Stephen Hawking
#21. Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill.
Stephen Hawking
#22. It is said that there's no such thing as a free lunch. But the universe is the ultimate free lunch.
Stephen Hawking
#23. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this.
Stephen Hawking
#24. Equations are just the boring part of mathematics. I attempt to see things in terms of geometry.
Stephen Hawking
#25. If you think it is hard to get humans to follow traffic laws, imagine convincing an asteroid to move along an ellipse.
Stephen Hawking
#27. Nothing is fool-proof to a sufficiently talented fool.
Stephen Hawking
#28. The Simpsons is the best thing on American television.
Stephen Hawking
#29. It is impossible to imagine a four-dimensional space. I personally find it hard enough to visualize a three-dimensional space!
Stephen Hawking
#31. You cannot understand the glories of the universe without believing there is some Supreme Power behind it.
Stephen Hawking
#32. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.
Stephen Hawking
#33. I don't believe that the ultimate theory will come by steady work along existing lines. We need something new. We can't predict what that will be or when we will find it because if we knew that, we would have found it already!
Stephen Hawking
#34. The question is: is the way the universe began chosen by God for reasons we can't understand, or was it determined by a law of science? I believe the second. If you like, you can call the laws of science 'God', but it wouldn't be a personal God that you could meet, and ask questions.
Stephen Hawking
#36. Observations indicate that the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate. It will expand forever, getting emptier and darker.
Stephen Hawking
#37. I have found far greater enthusiasm for science in America than here in Britain. There is more enthusiasm for everything in America.
Stephen Hawking
#38. The microwave background indicated that the universe had had a hot, dense stage in the past.
Stephen Hawking
#39. All of my life, I have been fascinated by the big questions that face us, and have tried to find scientific answers to them. If, like me, you have looked at the stars, and tried to make sense of what you see, you too have started to wonder what makes the universe exist.
Stephen Hawking
#40. In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?
Stephen Hawking
#41. 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.
Stephen Hawking
#42. My first popular book, 'A Brief History of Time,' aroused a great deal of interest, but many found it difficult to understand.
Stephen Hawking
#43. It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us
Stephen Hawking
#44. Some forms of motor neuron disease are genetically linked, but I have no indication that my kind is. No other member of my family has had it. But I would be in favour of abortion if there was a high risk.
Stephen Hawking
#45. I think those who have a terminal illness and are in great pain should have the right to choose to end their own life, and those that help them should be free from prosecution.
Stephen Hawking
#47. Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible.
Stephen Hawking
#48. The large-scale homogeneity of the universe makes it very difficult to believe that the structure of the universe is determined by anything so peripheral as some complicated molecular structure on a minor planet orbiting a very average star in the outer suburbs of a fairly typical galaxy.
Stephen Hawking
#49. I thought Eddie Redmayne portrayed me very well ... At times I thought he was me.
Stephen Hawking
#50. The human race may be the only intelligent beings in the galaxy.
Stephen Hawking
#51. I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire. And it also puts our worries in perspective.
Stephen Hawking
#52. The Ionian idea that the universe is not human-centered was a milestone
Stephen Hawking
#53. Nothing is better than reading and gaining more and more knowledge.
Stephen Hawking
#54. ... only in the few universes that are like ours would intelligent beings develop and ask the question: "Why is the universe the way we see it?" The answer is then simple: If it had been any different, we would not be here!
Stephen Hawking
#55. On the observational side, by far the most important development has been the measurement of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation by COBE (the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite)
Stephen Hawking
#56. (The story that Newton was inspired by an apple hitting his head is almost certainly apocryphal. All Newton himself ever said was that the idea of gravity came to him as he sat "in a contemplative mood" and "was occasioned by the fall of an apple.")
Stephen Hawking
#57. The origin of the name is an enigmatic quotation from James Joyce: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Stephen Hawking
#58. The cyclic universe theory predicts no gravitational waves from the early universe.
Stephen Hawking
#59. With genetic engineering, we will be able to increase the complexity of our DNA, and improve the human race. But it will be a slow process, because one will have to wait about 18 years to see the effect of changes to the genetic code.
Stephen Hawking
#60. If we ever do find a complete theory of the universe, it would be a great triumph of human reason but it wouldn't leave much for us to do. We need an intellectual challenge.
Stephen Hawking
#61. We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is?
Stephen Hawking
#62. 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.
Stephen Hawking
#63. The voice I use is a very old hardware speech synthesizer made in 1986. I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better and because I have identified with it.
Stephen Hawking
#64. We think that life develops spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere in the universe. But we don't know the probability that a planet develops life.
Stephen Hawking
#66. Not to leave planet Earth would be like castaways on a desert island not trying to escape ... Sending humans to other planets ... will shape the future of the human race in ways we don't yet understand, and may determine whether we have any future at all.
Stephen Hawking
#67. Time and space are finite in extent, but they don't have any boundary or edge. They would be like the surface of the earth, but with two more dimensions.
Stephen Hawking
#68. If we want to travel into the future, we just need to go fast. Really fast. And I think the only way we're ever likely to do that is by going into space.
Stephen Hawking
#70. What is important is that we have the ability to create.
Stephen Hawking
#71. It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
Stephen Hawking
#72. In 1687, when Sir Isaac Newton published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, probably the most important single work ever published in the physical sciences.
Stephen Hawking
#73. Before we understood science, it was natural to believe that God created the universe, but now science offers a more convincing explanation." "What I meant by 'we would know the mind of God' is we would know everything that God would know if there was a God, but there isn't. I'm an atheist.
Stephen Hawking
#74. Thus, in a sense, we are all doomed. even if we stay away from black holes
Stephen Hawking
#75. The victim should have the right to end his life, if he wants. But I think it would be a great mistake. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope.
Stephen Hawking
#76. In this way, Edwin Hubble worked out the distances to nine different galaxies. We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars.
Stephen Hawking
#78. The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.
Stephen Hawking
#79. Only black holes of very low mass would emit a significant amount of radiation.
Stephen Hawking
#81. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.
Stephen Hawking
#82. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it.
Stephen Hawking
#83. There should be a better way to start a day than waking up every morning.
Stephen Hawking
#84. It's time to commit to finding the answer, to search for life beyond Earth. Mankind has a deep need to explore, to learn, to know. We also happen to be sociable creatures. It is important for us to know if we are alone in the dark.
Stephen Hawking
#85. (According to some accounts, a journalist told Eddington in the early 1920s that he had heard there were only three people in the world who understood general relativity. Eddington paused, then replied, "I am trying to think who the third person is.")
Stephen Hawking
#86. Our minds work in real time, which begins at the Big Bang and will end, if there is a Big Crunch - which seems unlikely, now, from the latest data showing accelerating expansion. Consciousness would come to an end at a singularity.
Stephen Hawking
#87. As often happens in science, discoveries are made in the pursuit of an elusive (and sometimes nonexistent) goal.
Stephen Hawking
#88. It was Einstein's dream to discover the grand design of the universe, a single theory that explains everything. However, physicists in Einstein's day hadn't made enough progress in understanding the forces of nature for that to be a realistic goal.
Stephen Hawking
#89. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. Where there's life, there's hope.
Stephen Hawking
#90. Each exists for but a short time, and in that time explore but a small part of the whole universe.
Stephen Hawking
#91. God not only plays dice, he throws them in the corner where you can't see them.
Stephen Hawking
#92. I may contradict myself, but at least I don't contradict myself.
Stephen Hawking
#93. It is extremely important to me to write for children.
Stephen Hawking
#94. The eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe.
Stephen Hawking
#95. Science fiction can be exciting and very gripping, but it doesn't tell us anything about the universe in which we live.
Stephen Hawking
#97. It is a waste of time to be angry about my disability. One has to get on with life and I haven't done badly. People won't have time for you if you are always angry or complaining. - Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking
#98. If a star were a grain of salt, you could fit all the stars visible to the naked eye on a teaspoon, but all the stars in the universe would fill a ball more than eight miles wide.
Stephen Hawking
#99. Aristotle thought the earth was stationary and that the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars moved in circular orbits about the earth.
Stephen Hawking
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