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If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

— Stephen Hawking

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More quotes by Stephen Hawking

Although September 11 was horrible, it didn't threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear weapons do.

The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.

A Brief History of Time (1988)

I still believe there are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature.

A Brief History of Time (1988)

Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases.

A Brief History of Time (1988)

In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?

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We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.

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Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Alfred North Whitehead An Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

John Gilmore

If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth, then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.

Pope Benedict XVI

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Stephen Hawking (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.