Stephen Hawking Quotes

Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

I regard [the many worlds interpretation] as self-evidently correct. [T.F.: Yet some don't find it evident to themselves.] Yeah, well, there are some people who spend an awful lot of time talking about the interpretation of quantum mechanics. My attitude — I would paraphrase Goering—is that when I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my gun.

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

There ought to be something very special about the boundary conditions of the universe and what can be more special than that there is no boundary?

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

On seeing the Enterprise's warp engine while visiting the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation (where he would briefly play himself in the 1993 episode Descent, Part I), Hawking smiled and said: I'm working on that.

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.

The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.

I think computer viruses should count as life … I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.