Freeman Dyson Quotes

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.

Although every step must be taken to protect against a chemical or biological attack in America, our nation would survive the use of those weapons as we did when anthrax was mailed to our Capitol and other targets.

Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.

Bio-terrorism is a threat.

In the field of biological weapons, there is almost no prospect of detecting a pathogen until it has been used in an attack.

Biological weapons in the hands of terrorists or states represent such a serious threat to our security and to international security that we must focus on prevention.

In such a climate, no one who held a position of responsibility in the Manhattan Project could doubt that we were trying to perfect a weapon that, however repugnant to us as human beings, could nonetheless save untold numbers of American lives.

The lack of U. S. Capability to rapidly recognize, respond, and recover from a biological attack is the most significant failure identified in this report card. Especially troubling is the lack of priority given to the development of medical countermeasures … the vaccines and medicines that would be required to mitigate the consequences of an attack.

What we are talking about is extended world war...People would move on a massive scale. Hundreds of millions, probably billions of people would have to move.

A world war - God forbid! - will leave only smoldering ashes as a mute testimony of a human race whose folly led inexorably to untimely death. Yet there are those who sincerely feel that disarmament is an evil and international negotiation is an abominable waste of time.

I did not know that the planning for biological and chemical warfare was so widespread in England, and even in France before France fell. It was news to me that there had been talk, even in the First World War, of dropping Colorado beetles on German potato crops and that kind of thing.

The essence of war is fire, famine, and pestilence. They contribute to its outbreak; they are among its weapons; they become its consequences.

As Churchill said about the Great War, and he said this in about 1924, that it was the first war in which man realized that he could obliterate himself completely. If you consider the way the whole world was impacted, 18 million people worldwide died, and that is taking into account military and civilian deaths: 18 million people. And it was the whole world, if you will. You know, many of those trenches were dug by Chinese. There are photographs of Chinese looking like they just came from China, with their hats and so on, digging the trenches, right from the beginning.

The Second World War took place not so much because no one won the First, but because the Versailles Treaty did not acknowledge this truth.

Wars are fought by teenagers, you realize that. They really ought to be fought by the politicians and old people who start these wars.

There will be no veterans of World War III.

I don't know what weapons will be used in the Third World War. But I can tell you what they'll use in the Fourth - rocks!

in this great war [WWI] ... they had, all of them, on all sides, lost their freedom. The freedom to think hopefully of the future.

I think the fact that Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World and talked about anthrax bombs probably helped because at least we... people had the understanding before the war began that's something we didn't want to get into.

It seemed to me singularly ill-contrived for the British government to be going to war with Hitler when Hitler might have been about to attack the Russians, and even more ill-contrived that, when Hitler did attack the Russians, he had already defeated the French army. What I'm saying is that the war shouldn't have been started in September 1939...from the point of view of Britain, the war was really not a good thing and I would regard it as, in effect, a defeat.

The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.

If Saddam's regime and survival are threatened [by invasion], he will have nothing to lose, and may use everything at his disposal... If weapons of mass destruction land on Israeli soil, killing innocent civilians, the experts I have consulted believe Israel will retaliate, and possibly with nuclear weapons... Nor can we rule out the possibility that Saddam would assault American forces with chemical or biological weapons.

For more than twenty-five years my mind had been deeply troubled by the fact that these mechanical and scientific achievements ofman had outrun his intellectual and spiritual power. ...Throughout the Second World War this terrible problem hung in the back of my mind. As I write these words the problem and the danger are as threatening as ever. We hope our nation will survive, but in its effort to survive will it transform itself intellectually and spiritually into the image of the thing against which we fought?

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace.