Stephen Hawking Quotes

If it [the universe] was expanding fairly slowly, the force of gravity would cause it eventually to stop expanding and then to start contracting. However, if it was expanding at more than a certain critical rate, gravity would never be strong enough to stop it, and the universe would continue to expand forever.

Latest survey shows that 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the world's population.

Its a crazy world out there. Be curious.

We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.

A snooze button is a poor substitute for no alarm clock at all.

If you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away.

Thirty years ago I was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, and given two and a half years to live. I have always wondered how they could be so precise about the half.

The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression.

You cannot understand the glories of the universe without believing there is some Supreme Power behind it.

Science is not only a disciple of reason but, also, one of romance and passion.

If we ever do find a complete theory of the universe, it would be a great triumph of human reason but it wouldn't leave much for us to do. We need an intellectual challenge.

The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.

I'm very interested in film making. It's telling a story, fiction or non-fiction. I have been filmed quite a lot. Contrary to popular belief, filming isn't glamorous. It can be wearingly repetitious, as the same shot is taken over and over again.

For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen.

Over a very small number of rolls of the dice, the uncertainty principle is very important.

Among physicists, I'm respected I hope.

One does not have to appeal to God to set the initial conditions for the creation of the universe, but if one does He would have to act through the laws of physics.

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.

People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.

To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.

There is no unique picture of reality.

I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science. It has no beginning and no end.

My first popular book, 'A Brief History of Time,' aroused a great deal of interest, but many found it difficult to understand.

The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron .... The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.

We are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. But I'm an optimist.

We waste time, so you don't have to.

The life we have on Earth must have spontaneously generated itself. It must therefore be possible for life to generate spontaneously elsewhere in the universe.

The rate of progress is so rapid that what one learns at school or university is always a bit out of date. Only a few people can keep up with the rapidly advancing frontier of knowledge, and they have to devote their whole time to it and specialize in a small area. The rest of the population has little idea of the advances that are being made or the excitement they are generating.

As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe.

I think computer viruses should count as life.

There is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at a new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap.

We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I learned from this exercise was not to begin a sentence with "And." When I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with "And," I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible? But it was in vain. Robert Graves at that time was very keen on the symbolism and mysticism in the Bible.

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.

There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. However bad life may seem, there is always hope.

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

We've created life in our own image.

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.

Maybe I don't have the most common kind of motor neuron disease, which usually kills in two or three years.

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.

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

Ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.

Is god omnipotent ? If he is, can he create a rock so heavy he can't lift it ?

Every man should marry. After all, happiness is not the only thing in life.

I have so much that I want to do. I hate wasting time.

I think [contacting an alien civilization] would be a disaster. The extraterrestrials would probably be far in advance of us. The history of advanced races meeting more primitive people on this planet is not very happy, and they were the same species. I think we should keep our heads low.

We explore because we are human and we want to know. I hope that Pluto will help us on that journey.

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.