Quotes from Stephen Hawking

If at first you don't succeed, try management.

I think computer viruses should count as life.

All my adult life people have been helping me.

In fact, if one considers the possible constants and laws that could have emerged, the odds against a universe that produced life like ours are immense.

There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet.

If human life were long enough to find the ultimate theory, everything would have been solved by previous generations. Nothing would be left to be discovered.

No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before.

The human race may be the only intelligent beings in the galaxy.

The radiation left over from the Big Bang is the same as that in your microwave oven but very much less powerful. It would heat your pizza only to minus 271.3*C - not much good for defrosting the pizza, let alone cooking it.

My discovery that black holes emit radiation raised serious problems of consistency with the rest of physics. I have now resolved these problems, but the answer turned out to be not what I expected.

Women. They are a complete mystery.

While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve. I'm no better than anyone else at understanding what makes people tick, particularly women.

I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.

One cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.

Theoretical physics is one of the few fields in which being disabled is no handicap - it is all in the mind.

Most people don't have time to master the very mathematical details of theoretical physics.

Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can't be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.

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.

We are all different. There is no such thing as a standard or run-of-the-mill human being, but we share the same human spirit.

It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years.

One could imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand.

Time can behave like another direction in space under extreme conditions.

Doing a job RIGHT the first time gets the job done. Doing the job WRONG fourteen times gives you job security.

So next time someone complains that you have made a mistake, tell him that may be a good thing. Because without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.