Quotes from Stephen Hawking

Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest.

These laws may have originally been decreed by God, but it appears that he has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not now intervene in it.

Our very existence imposes rules determining from where and at what time it is possible for us to observe the universe. That is, the fact of our being restricts the characteristics of the kind of environment in which we find ourselves. That principle is called the weak anthropic principle.

In Britain, people don't seem too worried about a possible end twenty billion years in the future. You can do quite a lot of eating, drinking and being merry before that.

On what he thinks about all day "Women. They are a complete mystery.

What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.

The success of A Brief History indicates that there is widespread interest in the big questions like: Where did we come from? And why is the universe the way it is?

Most laws of nature exist as part of a larger, interconnected system of laws.

In a sense the debate between Penrose and Hawking is a continuation of that earlier argument, with Penrose playing the role of Einstein and Hawking that of Bohr.

Though realism may be a tempting viewpoint, as we'll see later, what we know about modern physics makes it a difficult one to defend.

There is a history of the universe in which England win the World Cup again, though maybe the probability is low.