Quotes from Steven Weinberg

Certainly good causes have sometimes been mobilized under the banner of religion, but you find the opposite, I think, more often the case.

Sometimes nature seems more beautiful than strictly necessary.

My work during the 1970s has been mainly concerned with the implications of the unified theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions, with the development of the related theory of strong interactions known as quantum chromodynamics, and with steps toward the unification of all interactions.

My Ph.D. thesis, with Sam Treiman as adviser, was on the application of renormalization theory to the effects of strong interactions in weak interaction processes.

Symmetry principles are principles governing the laws of nature that say those laws look the same if you change your point of view in certain ways.

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.

It's very difficult to convince other countries that they shouldn't pursue nuclear weapons programs if we ourselves are actively developing a component of a strategic defense system.

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.

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.

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

On balance the moral influence of religion has been awful.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.

I would say it's a lot easier to develop a decoy system than to develop the intercontinental ballistic missile itself. I would think that any country that could develop the missile could develop quite a decoy system. It doesn't have to be terribly sophisticated.