Stephen Hawking Quotes

133 Sourced Quotes

It is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if the answer is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that of who created God.

Stephen Hawking
What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.

Stephen Hawking
The universe of Eastern mysticism is an illusion, A physicist who attempts to link it with his own work has abandoned physics.

Stephen Hawking
I am discounting reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?

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

Stephen Hawking
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.

Stephen Hawking
We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system.
On colonizing space

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

Stephen Hawking
We are each free to believe what we want and it is my view that the simplest explanation is there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization. There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that, I am extremely grateful.

Stephen Hawking
The universe would have expanded in a smooth way from a single point. As it expanded, it would have borrowed energy from the gravitational field, to create matter. As any economist could have predicted, the result of all that borrowing, was inflation. The universe expanded and borrowed at an ever-increasing rate. Fortunately, the debt of gravitational energy will not have to be repaid until the end of the universe.

Stephen Hawking
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. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.

Stephen Hawking
Asked what he thinks about most during the day:
Women. They are a complete mystery.

Stephen Hawking
We are all different - but we share the same human spirit. Perhaps it's human nature that we adapt - and survive.

Stephen Hawking
I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers.

Stephen Hawking
There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made out of antiparticles. However, if you ever meet your antiself, don't shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light.

Stephen Hawking
On the possibility of contact with an alien civilization:
I think it 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.

Stephen Hawking
Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Thus our presence selects out from this vast array only these universes that are compatible without existence. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense, the lords of creation.

Stephen Hawking
If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans. … We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet.

Stephen Hawking
Gravity is so strong that space is bent round onto itself, making it rather like the surface of the earth. If one keeps traveling in a certain direction on the surface of the earth, one never comes up against an impassable barrier or falls over the edge, but eventually comes back to where one started.

Stephen Hawking
I don't believe that the ultimate theory will come by steady work along existing lines. We need something new. We can't predict what that will be or when we will find it because if we knew that, we would have found it already! It could come in the next 20 years, but we might never find it.

Stephen Hawking
Maybe that is our mistake: maybe there are no particle positions and velocities, but only waves. It is just that we try to fit the waves to our preconceived ideas of positions and velocities. The resulting mismatch is the cause of the apparent unpredictability.

Stephen Hawking
Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in.

Stephen Hawking
There is no way that we can predict the weather six months ahead beyond giving the seasonal average

Stephen Hawking
It is a waste of time to be angry about my disability. One has to get on with life and I haven't done badly. People won't have time for you if you are always angry or complaining.

Stephen Hawking
Mathematics is more than a tool and language for science. It is also an end in itself, and as such, it has, over the centuries, affected our worldview in its own right.

Stephen Hawking