Fred Hoyle Quotes

39 quotes in 719 categories

• Earlier theories ... were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time…
• One [idea] was that the Universe started its life a finite time ago in a single huge explosion, and that the present expansion is a…
• The universe is a put-up job.
• It is emphatically the case that life could not arise spontaneously in a primeval soup of any kind.... Furthermore, no geological evidence indicates an organic…
• Life cannot have had a random beginning. ... The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all…
• The chance that higher life forms might have emerged through evolutionary processes is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard…
• It is the true nature of mankind to learn from mistakes, not from example.
• Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to…
• The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is 1 to a number with 40,000 noughts after it (1040,000).... It is big enough…
• Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, we shall, in an emotional sense, acquire an additional dimension...
• There is a coherent plan to the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for.
• I don't see the logic of rejecting data just because they seem incredible.
• A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What…
• When I was young, the old regarded me as an outrageous young fellow, and now that I'm old the young regard me as an outrageous…
• The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic…
• The suggestion that petroleum might have arisen from some transformation of squashed fish or biological detritus is surely the silliest notion to have been entertained…
• I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find…
• Things are the way they are because they were the way they were.
• Once I had learnt my twelve times table (at the age of three) it was downhill all the way.
• The man who voyages strange seas must of necessity be a little unsure of himself. It is the man with the flashy air of knowing…

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