Skip to content

If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation.

— Freeman Dyson Disturbing the Universe (1979)

Another quote →

Topics

Technology

More quotes by Freeman Dyson

The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.

Imagined Worlds (1997)

Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages.

Infinite in All Directions (1988)

An awareness of our smallness may help to redeem us from the arrogance which is the besetting sin of the scientists.

Infinite in All Directions (1988)

There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions.

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole.

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

All Freeman Dyson quotes →

You may also like

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

Buckminster Fuller

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

Attribution

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