Top 100 Dyson's Quotes
#2. Companies are not ingenious, it's the people in them that are.
James Dyson
#3. I think that he [Michael Jackson] did derive an ultimate sense of joy and satisfaction in what others enjoyed from him that was denied to himself. There's no question that the transcendent art that he created was a means, an instrument, a vehicle for others to experience what he didn't.
Michael Eric Dyson
#4. I would like to see us shake-in, instead of a shakeout, in the sense that it's true that there's a lot of junk online, and we have to filter it and so forth.
Esther Dyson
#5. The seeds from Ramanujan's garden have been blowing on the wind and have been sprouting all over the landscape.
[On the stimulating effects of Ramanujan's mathematical legacy.]
Freeman Dyson
#6. Obviously, Jay-Z is one of the greatest entertainers of the world today. Not only is he a remarkable rhetorical genius, he's also a man of deep sympathy and empathy for those who are lost and vulnerable, but especially under-educated youth of all cultures and stripes.
Michael Eric Dyson
#7. People need to understand that the technology is for them. It's not to them. It's not over them. People still sometimes want to be led a little too much.
Esther Dyson
#8. 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?
Freeman Dyson
#9. Speaking out against rap music is useless, and it's futile. The reality is there's criticism for everything, but Jay-Z is one of the most remarkable artists of our time of any genre, and as a hip-hop artist he carries the weight of that art form with such splendor and grace and genius.
Michael Eric Dyson
#10. The pain of childbirth is not remembered. It's the child that's remembered.
Freeman Dyson
#11. There's a great book about John Kennedy and his relationship to civil rights called 'The Bystander.' The title alone suggests that he did as little as possible, any minimal critical effort, to really facilitate civil rights in the White House.
Michael Eric Dyson
#12. New landscape of personal media has given us a vaster wasteland of cyberspace. But, luckily for us, there's some really wonderful stuff in it. And if history is any guide, as the media matures, the quality will continue to go up.
Esther Dyson
#13. I think that what Donald Trump is doing, the way in which racism, xenophobia, anti-Muslim belief and the like are being expressed through the campaign of Donald Trump, calls for, I think, a very vigorous and aggressive response to what he's saying.
Michael Eric Dyson
#14. There's nothing wrong with things taking time.
James Dyson
#15. People still have a choice, but, if they find it all too confusing, or they just want someone else to make a choice for them, there's a default that works pretty well. That's this concept of libertarian paternalism. And it's handy.
Esther Dyson
#16. Nd the same rapper who revels in a woman's finely proportioned behind may also speak against racism and on behalf of the poor, even as he encourages them not to look at hip-hop as their salvation.
Michael Eric Dyson
#17. Far too few designers put any thought into usability, ending up with a great product that's completely inaccessible.
James Dyson
#18. The Web is fascinating and transformative, but it's an easy, flashy, get-rich-quick option to the hard graft of proper industry.
James Dyson
#19. In the barbershop, there's democracy. You're a professor; you're an engineer; you're a garbage man, have at it. You got something to say, get down with it.
Michael Eric Dyson
#20. I don't believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your diapers. And if that's the case, you ain't self-made.
Michael Eric Dyson
#21. I'm not trying to say stop Donald Trump from being elected as his party's nominee. I'm saying that we have a responsibility to raise our voices, to say what he does as an American citizen is pretty destructive to the practice of goodhearted and conscientious politics.
Michael Eric Dyson
#22. Just because you see pictures of glaciers falling into the ocean doesn't mean anything bad is happening. This is something that happens all the time. It's part of the natural cycle of things. We know from measurements that glaciers have been melting for 200 years at least.
Freeman Dyson
#23. Everyone gets knocked back, no one rises smoothly to the top without hindrance. The ones who succeed are those who say, right, let's give it another go.
James Dyson
#24. An inventor's path is chorused with groans, riddled with fist-banging and punctuated by head scratches.
James Dyson
#25. I like people who are working on practical things and who are working in teams. It's not so important to get the glory. It's much more important to get something that works. It's a better way to live.
Freeman Dyson
#26. Life is nature's way to give mind oportunities it wouldn't otherwise had.
Freeman Dyson
#27. 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
#28. Record labels collude with some of the radio stations, and the radio stations have their play lists, dependent upon what they call the, quote, 'hits.' What's commercially viable gets recycled, endlessly repeated, and as a result of that, the progressive music can't break in.
Michael Eric Dyson
#29. It's funny. From up here, the destruction seems to fade. Almost as if like people, in time, even the world can heal itself.
Eloise Dyson
#30. Engineering is treated with disdain, on the whole. It's considered to be rather boring and irrelevant, yet neither of those is true.
James Dyson
#31. China has all the advantages in the world. But it doesn't have a history of free thinking, risk-taking pioneers - the kind of people the U.S. is built upon.
James Dyson
#32. There are huge divorces and divides and chasms in black America between the have-gots and the have-nots, between the monied and the poor, between the educated and the non-educated. And there are huge and growing chasms daily. And I want to say that it's not simply about generation. It's about genre.
Michael Eric Dyson
#33. Encryption ... is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government ... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty.
Esther Dyson
#34. 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.
Freeman Dyson
#35. Life is not a race, but a journey to be savoured each step of the way. Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery and today is a gift. That's why we call it the present.
Brian Dyson
#36. It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear.
Freeman Dyson
#37. China can and will be an invaluable trading partner to both the U.S. and the U.K.
James Dyson
#38. I don't think of myself predicting things. I'm expressing possibilities. Things that could happen. To a large extent it's a question of how badly people want them to.
Freeman Dyson
#39. Race was thick in the O.J. Simpson case from the very beginning, but it wasn't evident. And I think the O.J. Simpson case revealed that there is subtle race, and there is sophisticated race, and there's evident and observable race.
Michael Eric Dyson
#40. The U.S. is the biggest investor in research and development in the world. It has the best universities. Keeping them supplied with the best talent is essential.
James Dyson
#41. When you say 'design,' everybody thinks of magazine pages. So it's an emotive word. Everybody thinks it's how something looks, whereas for me, design is pretty much everything.
James Dyson
#42. Manufacturing is more than just putting parts together. It's coming up with ideas, testing principles and perfecting the engineering, as well as final assembly.
James Dyson
#43. That's what Old World love really is. To be so close to someone that our hearts are connected by a force stronger than the distance between us.
Eloise Dyson
#44. If you invent something, you're doing a creative act. It's like writing a novel or composing music. You put your heart and soul into it, and money. It's years of your life, it's your house remortgaged, huge emotional investment and financial investment.
James Dyson
#45. 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
#46. Don't shut love out of your life by saying it's impossible to find time. The quickest way to receive love is to give; the fastest way to lose love is to hold it too tightly; and the best way to keep love is to give it wings.
Brian Dyson
#48. The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.
Freeman Dyson
#49. The Net is not a single home. Rather, it's an environment where thousands of small homes and communities can form and define and design themselves.
Esther Dyson
#50. But there is a corollary to freedom and that's personal responsibility, and the real challenge is how you generate that personal responsibility without imposing it.
Esther Dyson
#51. Britain's great strength is its innovative, design and engineering natural ability and we're not using it.
James Dyson
#53. I think that not only do saints make poor role models, they are incapable in one sense of identifying radically with those of us who are mere mortals. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s mortality says to us that here's a figure who got up every day of his life facing tremendous odds and yet overcame them.
Michael Eric Dyson
#54. There's almost no way of doing importing honestly, because if you do you're at such a disadvantage competitively. So people spend huge amounts of effort getting around stupid laws and not paying taxes.
Esther Dyson
#55. Bill Cosby is a famous black guy who has a bully pulpit the size of the world; it's global. He puts his colossal foot on the vulnerable necks of poor people, and as a result of that, we don't have a balanced conversation.
Michael Eric Dyson
#56. I'm afraid I am tidy, and I have to be because the office is open plan and my glass office door is literally always open.
James Dyson
#57. In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses.
Freeman Dyson
#58. There is no way to find the best design except to try out as many designs as possible and discard the failures.
Freeman Dyson
#59. The debacle of European pacifism has at least one clear lesson to teach us: pacifists, if they are to be effective in the modern world, must be as wholehearted and as brave as Gandhi.
Freeman Dyson
#60. There's a dark underside to philanthropy. People who give a bunch of money are deferred to, even when they are wrong. The emperor cannot be shown to have no clothes.
Michael Eric Dyson
#61. Elvis [Presley] had a stepstool, if you will, to success because he came from the dominant culture. They identified with him. Michael Jackson had to come further and go deeper into the pit of possibility of American democracy and of cultural expression.
Michael Eric Dyson
#63. There is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence - and in the end you make it look like a quantum leap.
James Dyson
#64. So long as you have courage and a sense of humor, it is never too late to start life afresh.
Freeman Dyson
#65. It doesn't cost anything to replicate code. So the companies that make code, that's why they've done so well. We take it for granted now, but why is it that code is free? It's because somebody built this self-replicating process.
George Dyson
#66. What I'm thinking about more and more these days is simply the importance of transparency, and Jefferson's saying that he'd rather have a free press without a government than a government without a free press.
Esther Dyson
#67. In the past, the U.K. got away with selling things that weren't unusual. Now it's no use trying to export without having something that's unusual and better.
James Dyson
#68. For many scientists less divinely gifted than Einstein,the chief reward for being a scientist is not the power and the money but the chance of catching a glimpse of the transcendent beauty of nature.
Freeman Dyson
#69. When I started off, I was working in a shed behind my house. All I had was a drill, an electric drill. That was the only machine I had.
James Dyson
#71. Failure is so much more interesting because you learn from it. That's what we should be teaching children at school, that being successful the first time, there's nothing in it. There's no interest, you learn nothing actually.
James Dyson
#72. The marketplace judges technologies by their practical effectiveness, by whether they succeed or fail to do the job they are designed to do.
Freeman Dyson
#73. It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be
approached without some humor and some bewilderment.
Freeman Dyson
#74. People have to understand that they can reject technology. They can turn off their cell phone. They can stop looking at their e-mail. It's there if they want it. It's not being forced on them.
Esther Dyson
#75. By denying its musical and artistic merit, hip hop's critics get to have it both ways: they can deny the legitimate artistic standing of rap while seizing on its pervasive influence as an art form to prove what a terrible effect it has on youth.
Michael Eric Dyson
#76. I grew up in Detroit. I was a teen father. I lived on welfare for three years. I have a brother serving life in prison, though I believe he's innocent.
Michael Eric Dyson
#77. I think the fact that Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World and talked about anthrax bombs probably helped because at least we ... people had the understanding before the war began that's something we didn't want to get into.
Freeman Dyson
#78. White pages are not bad news. They're just part of the process. What's a sea voyage without long weary days spent crossing the blank bits of the map? It's how you get to the other side.
John Dyson
#79. White-on-white crime is a devastation in America like so-called black-on-black crime. It's not black or white-on-white crime. It's proximity murder.
Michael Eric Dyson
#80. Ralph Ellison is a classic work of erudition, grace, and elegance. Rampersad offers us an Ellison whose gifts and warts orbit the same universe of creative genius. Like Ellison's work, Rampersad's text wrestles eloquently with difficult truths about race, politics, and American life.
Michael Eric Dyson
#81. History is one of the only fields where contributions by amateurs are taken seriously, providing you follow the rules and document your sources. In history, it's what you write, not what your credentials are.
George Dyson
#82. I think that the use of copyright is going to change dramatically. Part of it is economics. There is just going to be so much content out there - there's a scarcity of attention. Information consumes attention, and there's too much information.
Esther Dyson
#83. I don't believe in technological determinism, especially not in biology and medicine. We have strong laws to keep doctors from monkeying around with humans that will remain in place. It's simply not true that everything that is technologically possible gets done.
Freeman Dyson
#84. The writer's gift can make us see ourselves and our morals differently than our reality suggests.
Michael Eric Dyson
#85. We could construct a machine that is more intelligent than we can understand. It's possible Google is that kind of thing already. It scales so fast.
George Dyson
#86. We simply don't know yet what's going to happen to the carbon in the atmosphere.
Freeman Dyson
#87. It's not going to be just humans colonizing space, it's going to be life moving out from the Earth, moving it into its kingdom. And the kingdom of life, of course, is going to be the universe.
Freeman Dyson
#88. Michael Joseph Jackson's genius was the ability to be the raw article himself - the real article himself. He is part of the African American people who were marginalized.
Michael Eric Dyson
#89. I don't do something necessarily to make a big profit or because it's a logical business decision.
James Dyson
#90. The biologists have essentially been pushed aside. Al Gore's just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.
Freeman Dyson
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. Oh, that all the things my father had told me about how disgusting Washington is are true. And again it's the system - there are lots of nice, well-meaning people there. But it's a sleazy place. And politics is all about doing favors.
Esther Dyson
#94. Your life will always be filled with challenges. It's best to admit this to yourself and decide to be happy anyway.
Brian Dyson
#95. I made 5,127 prototypes of my vaccum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one. That's how I came up with a solution. So I don't mind failure.
James Dyson
#96. The way the world is going, it's technology driven. And it isn't just driven by the old super powers, it's driven by the far east and new emerging economies.
James Dyson
#97. Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.
Freeman Dyson
#98. He was not hip-hop's most gifted emcee. Still, Shakur may be the most influential and compelling rapper of them all, he was more than the sum of his artistic parts.
Michael Eric Dyson
#99. I had a lot of successes, but what really made me fearless was my complete failure at Zidd-Davis. Once you've lived through that, you know you can survive, and you're not as scared ... There's nothing to build confidence like real achievement, but also like real failure.
Esther Dyson
#100. And the Russians certainly don't have it. If a woman shows up in a fur coat, I just assume she's a crook. And that's me, the nice American. The assumption that you can't make money honestly is a killer.
Esther Dyson
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