Quotes from Stephen Hawking

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.

It now appears that the way the universe began can indeed be determined, using imaginary time.

My father was a research scientist in tropical medicine, so I always assumed I would be a scientist, too. I felt that medicine was too vague and inexact, so I chose physics.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

All that my work has shown is that you don't have to say that the way the universe began was the personal whim of God.

The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.

There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition.

Earth might one day soon resemble the planet Venus.

Although almost every theoretical physicist agrees with my prediction that a black hole should glow like a hot body, it would be very difficult to verify experimentally because the temperature of a macroscopic black hole is so low.

I had not expected 'A Brief History of Time' to be a best seller. It was my first popular book and aroused a great deal of interest. Initially, many people found it difficult to understand. I therefore decided to try to write a new version that would be easier to follow.

It often happens that I have an idea, but then I try to fill in the intermediate steps and find they don't work, so I have to give it up.

Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty.

The Simpsons is the best thing on American television.

The idea of 10 dimensions might sound exciting, but they would cause real problems if you forget where you parked your car.

If you lined up all the cars in the world end to end, someone would try to pass them.

Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain lurking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.

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.

Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren't equipped to visualise 11 dimensions directly. However, from a purely mathematical point of view it's just as easy to think in 11 dimensions, as it is to think in three or four.

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

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.

When one's expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one does have

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

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

Unless mankind redesigns itself by changing our DNA through altering our genetic makeup, computer-genera ted robots will take over our world.