740 Quotes by Stephen Hawking

But a machine that was powerful enough to accelerate particles to the grand unification energy would have to be as big as the Solar System – and would be unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.

I don’t want to write an autobiography because I would become public property with no privacy left.

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

Although September 11 was horrible, it didn’t threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear weapons do.

The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can’t solve the equations, directly in the abstract.

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.

There are plenty of dead scientists I admire, but I can’t think of any living ones. This is probably because it is only in retrospect that one can see who made the important contributions.

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.

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.