Steven Weinberg

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

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

The progress of science depends less than is usually believed on the efforts and performance of individuals but more on the concentration of collective effort on great questions.

I think atheism is a perfectly acceptable religious point of view.

The whole history of science shows that each generation finds the universe to be stranger than the last.

Beauty in physics is more than skin deep; it lies in the harmony of the equations.

There is no scientific reason to believe that there is a purpose to the universe.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we.

In science, we must be prepared to abandon our most cherished beliefs if the evidence demands it.

The search for a final theory is one of the great adventures of the human spirit.

Quantum mechanics makes no sense, but it works.

The laws of nature are as impersonal as the laws of arithmetic.

We live in a universe whose age we can't quite fathom, which is literally beyond human imagination.

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.

The Nobel Prize is not very important; it's more like a ticket to a lottery where the prize is a lot of work.

Physics is not a religion. If it were, I'd be an atheist.

The universe is the way it is because if it were different, we wouldn't be here to notice.

In the early universe, when the temperature was a billion degrees, matter and radiation were in equilibrium.

The anthropic principle is a tautology; it doesn't explain anything.