Steven Weinberg Quotes

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

A physicist friend of mine once said that in facing death, he drew some consolation from the reflection that he would never again have to look up the word "hermeneutics" in the dictionary.

It does not matter whether you win or lose, what matters is whether I win or lose!

Science doesn't make it impossible to believe in God, it just makes it possible not to believe in God

All logical arguments can be defeated by the simple refusal to reason logically

I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That's a good thing.

Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion, should be done and may, in fact, in the end, be our greatest contribution to civilization.

This is one of the great social functions of science - to free people from superstition

The whole history of the last thousands of years has been a history of religious persecutions and wars, pogroms, jihads, crusades. I find it all very regrettable, to say the least.

If there is a God that has special plans for humans, then He has taken very great pains to hide His concern for us. To me it would seem impolite if not impious to bother such a God with our prayers.

For good people to do evil things, it takes religion.

In science we don't have prophets. We have heroes, but not prophets.

Science should be taught not in order to support religion and not in order to destroy religion. Science should be taught simply ignoring religion.

As you learn more and more about the irrelevance of human life to the general mechanism of the universe, the idea of an interested god, becomes increasingly implausible.

On balance the moral influence of religion has been awful.

In complexity, it is only simplicity that can be interesting.

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

Maybe nature is fundamentally ugly, chaotic and complicated. But if it's like that, then I want out.

I don't need to argue here that the evil in the world proves that the universe is not designed, but only that there are no signs of benevolence that might have shown the hand of a designer.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

[C]reationists [and] other religious enthusiasts [are], in many parts of the world ..., the most dangerous adversaries of science.

The universe is an enormous direct product of representations of symmetry groups.

It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her.

They felt that science would be corrosive to religious belief and they were worried about it. Damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive to religious belief and it's a good thing.

As for me, I have just enough confidence about the multiverse to bet the lives of both Andrei Linde and Martin Rees’s dog.

Our job in physics is to see things simply, to understand a great many complicated phenomena in a unified way, in terms of a few simple principles.

It seems that scientists are often attracted to beautiful theories in the way that insects are attracted to flowers — not by logical deduction, but by something like a sense of smell.

Quantum field theory, which was born just fifty years ago from the marriage of quantum mechanics with relativity, is a beautiful but not very robust child.

If (the antiproton) had not been discovered, the foundations of physics really would have crumbled.

Rational argument can be defeated by refusing to argue rationally.

Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists.

[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.

The more we refine our understanding of God to make the concept plausible, the more it seems pointless.

A theorist today is hardly considered respectable if he or she has not introduced at least one new particle for which there is no experimental evidence.

Any possible universe could be explained as the work of some sort of designer. Even a universe that is completely chaotic...could be supposed to have been designed by an idiot.

I enjoy being at a meeting that doesn't start with an invocation!

My advice is to go for the messes - that's where the action is.

If language is to be of any use to us, then we ought to try and preserve the meaning of words, and 'god' historically has not meant the laws of nature.

The more comprehensible the universe becomes the more pointless it seems.

Journalists generally have no bias toward one cosmological theory or another, but many have a natural preference for excitement.

Elementary particles are terribly boring, which is one reason why we're so interested in them.

Even in the dark times between experimental breakthroughs, there always continues a steady evolution of theoretical ideas, leading almost imperceptibly to changes in previous beliefs.

Sometimes nature seems more beautiful than strictly necessary.

Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough.

It does not help that some politicians and journalists assume the public is interested only in those aspects of science that promise immediate practical applications to technology or medicine.

Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things.But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.