Steven Weinberg

“I love grand opera. I can't hear 'La Boheme' without dissolving.”

“Americans swept away the instruments of English hereditary inequality - entails and titles of nobility - even before we had a constitution.”

“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.”

“Many people do simply awful things out of sincere religious belief, not using religion as a cover the way that Saddam Hussein may have done, but really because they believe that this is what God wants them to do, going all the way back to Abraham being willing to sacrifice Issac because God told him to do that. Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible thing.”

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

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

“When you do calculations using quantum mechanics, even when you are calculating something perfectly sensible like the energy of an atomic state, you get an answer that is infinite. This means you are wrong - but how do you deal with that? Is there something wrong with the theory, or something wrong with the way you are doing the calculation?”

“One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.”

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

“I used to read a good deal of science fiction when I was a boy.”

“I was born in 1933 in New York City to Frederick and Eva Weinberg. My early inclination toward science received encouragement from my father, and by the time I was 15 or 16, my interests had focused on theoretical physics.”

“I'm afraid that it's not possible to design a defense against every conceivable threat that you can think of.”

“For someone who claimed to have found the true method for seeking reliable knowledge, it is remarkable how wrong Descartes was about so many aspects of nature.”

“Even though I knew pretty early that I was going to be a scientist, it wasn't the science that interested me in science fiction; it was the vision of future societies that, for better or worse, would be radically different from our own.”

“Religion is an insult to human dignity. 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”

“It used to be obvious that the world was designed by some sort of intelligence. What else could account for fire and rain and lightning and earthquakes? Above all, the wonderful abilities of living things seemed to point to a creator who had a special interest in life. Today we understand most of these things in terms of physical forces acting under impersonal laws. We don't yet know the most fundamental laws, and we can't work out all the consequences of the laws we do know. The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather. We can't predict whether it will rain one month from today, but we do know the rules that govern the rain, even though we can't always calculate their consequences. I see nothing about the human mind any more than about the weather that stands out as beyond the hope of understanding as a consequence of impersonal laws acting over billions of years.”

“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.”

“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.”

“After receiving my Ph.D. in 1957, I worked at Columbia and then from 1959 to 1966 at Berkeley.”

“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.”