{"author":"Freeman Dyson","author_id":"Freeman+Dyson","total_quotes":19,"quotes":[{"text":"A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible.","author":"Freeman Dyson","tags":["inspirational","intellectual","science"],"id":29151,"author_id":"Freeman+Dyson"},{"text":"We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.","author":"Freeman Dyson","tags":["adolescence","creativity","education","testing","thought"],"id":48181,"author_id":"Freeman+Dyson"},{"text":"Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.","author":"Freeman Dyson","tags":["life","god","mother "],"id":66394,"author_id":"Freeman+Dyson"},{"text":"The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.","author":"Freeman Dyson","tags":["civilization","history","technology"],"id":68102,"author_id":"Freeman+Dyson"},{"text":"We have no reason to think that climate change is harmful if you look at the world as a whole. Most places, in fact, are better off being warmer than being colder. And historically, the really bad times for the environment and for people have been the cold periods rather than the warm periods.","author":"Freeman Dyson","tags":["change","world","people "],"id":75282,"author_id":"Freeman+Dyson"},{"text":"Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.","author":"Freeman Dyson","tags":["dreams","science","science-fiction"],"id":116255,"author_id":"Freeman+Dyson"},{"text":"Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science.","author":"Freeman Dyson","tags":["science","global warming","see "],"id":133922,"author_id":"Freeman+Dyson"},{"text":"The essential fact which emerges ... Is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs ( of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.","author":"Freeman Dyson","tags":["cybernetics","science","systems"],"id":155379,"author_id":"Freeman+Dyson"},{"text":"Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people.","author":"Freeman Dyson","tags":["work","rose","engineering "],"id":191764,"author_id":"Freeman+Dyson"},{"text":"My first recommendation to people in charge of science education is, more money for public libraries and museums. Public libraries and museums ought to be as common as schools.","author":"Freeman Dyson","tags":["libraries","money"],"id":197002,"author_id":"Freeman+Dyson"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":19,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}