Fred Hoyle Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Fred Hoyle's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Astronomer Fred Hoyle's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 55 quotes on this page collected since June 24, 1915! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • I do not believe that anything really worthwhile will come out of the exploration of the slag heap that constitutes the surface of the moon...Nobody should imagine that the enormous financial budget of NASA implies that astronomy is now well supported.

    "Galaxies, Nuclei, and Quasars". Book by Fred Hoyle, 1965.
  • It is a mistake to imagine that potentially great men are rare. It is the conditions that permit the promise of greatness to be fulfilled that are rare. What is so difficult to achieve is the cultural background that permits potential greatness to be converted into actual greatness.

    Fred Hoyle (1966). “Of Men and Galaxies”, p.21, University of Washington Press
  • We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia... Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today.

    "Lifecloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe". Book by Chandra Wickramasinghe and Fred Hoyle (p. 15), 1978.
  • The universe is a put-up job.

  • There are many ways of knocking electrons out of atoms. The simplest is to rub two surfaces together.

  • Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule.

  • 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 old fellow.

    Scientific American, March 1995.
  • 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 is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.

    Fred Hoyle (1983). “The Intelligent Universe”
  • I am genuinely sorry for scientists of the younger generation who never knew Fisher personally. So long as you avoided a handful of subjects like inverse probability that would turn Fisher in the briefest possible moment from extreme urbanity into a boiling cauldron of wrath, you got by with little worse than a thick head from the port which he, like the Cambridge mathematician J. E. Littlewood, loved to drink in the evening. And on the credit side you gained a cherished memory of English spoken in a Shakespearean style and delivered in the manner of a Spanish grandee.

  • A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.

  • Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.

    1979 Quoted in the Observer,'Sayings of the Week', 9 Sep.
  • Well, we now have such a photograph... Has any new idea been let loose? It certainly has. You will have noticed how suddenly everybody has become seriously concerned to protect the natural environment... It seems to me more than a coincidence that this awareness should have happened at exactly the moment man took his first step into space.

  • The big bang theory requires a recent origin of the Universe that openly invites the concept of creation.

    Fred Hoyle (1983). “The Intelligent Universe”
  • Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes known, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.

  • The main efforts of investigators have been in papering over contradictions in the big bang theory, to build up an idea which has become ever more complex and cumbersome.

    "The Intelligent Universe". Book by Fred Hoyle, 1983.
  • There is a coherent plan to the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for.

  • Once I had learnt my twelve times table (at the age of three) it was downhill all the way.

  • The seemingly insuperable difficulties of deep-space travel suggest an intention to keep us fixed at home in our own solar system, and the physical nature of our part of the Universe, as well as the basic rules of physics and chemistry, have a warning look about them, like barriers designed to isolate intelligent life. This means that for us, unlike the situation for humble microorganisms, deep-space travel is probably a stark impossibility.

    Fred Hoyle (1983). “The Intelligent Universe”
  • He who lives among dogs must learn to pant.

  • On scientific grounds this big bang assumption is much less the palatable of the two. For it is an irrational process that cannot be described in scientific terms. . . . On philosophical grounds too I cannot see any good reason for preferring the big bang idea. Indeed it seems to me in the philosophical sense to be a distinctly unsatisfactory notion, since it puts the basic assumption out of sight where it can never be challenged by a direct appeal to observation.

    Fred Hoyle (1960). “The nature of the universe”
  • I don't see the logic of rejecting data just because they seem incredible ... the establishment defends itself by complicating everything to the point of incomprehensibility.

    Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.
  • In short there is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began in an organic soup here on the Earth.

    Fred Hoyle (1983). “The Intelligent Universe”
  • A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics.

    "The Universe: Past and Present Reflections". "Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics", volume 20, p. 16, September 1982.
  • 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 to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.

  • A superintellect has monkeyed with physics.

  • Earlier theories ... were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past. [Coining the "big bang" expression.]

  • Science is prediction, not explanation.

  • 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 by substantial numbers of persons over an extended period of time.

  • Here we are in this wholly fantastic universe with scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance.

    Fred Hoyle (1960). “The nature of the universe”
  • It is no more likely that our world has evolved out of chaos than that a hurricane, blowing through a junk yard, should create a Boeing.

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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 55 quotes from the Astronomer Fred Hoyle, starting from June 24, 1915! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!