Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
For good people to do evil things, it takes religion.
The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
On balance the moral influence of religion has been awful.
In complexity, it is only simplicity that can be interesting.
Sometimes nature seems more beautiful than strictly necessary.
I used to read a good deal of science fiction when I was a boy.
My advice is to go for the messes - that's where the action is.
I love grand opera. I can't hear 'La Boheme' without dissolving.
I enjoy being at a meeting that doesn't start with an invocation!
Rational argument can be defeated by refusing to argue rationally.
In science we don't have prophets. We have heroes, but not prophets.
[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
The more comprehensible the universe becomes the more pointless it seems.
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
All logical arguments can be defeated by the simple refusal to reason logically
The universe is an enormous direct product of representations of symmetry groups.
It does not matter whether you win or lose, what matters is whether I win or lose!
This is one of the great social functions of science - to free people from superstition
An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.
Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists.
After receiving my Ph.D. in 1957, I worked at Columbia and then from 1959 to 1966 at Berkeley.
Elementary particles are terribly boring, which is one reason why we're so interested in them.
If (the antiproton) had not been discovered, the foundations of physics really would have crumbled.
It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her.
Maybe nature is fundamentally ugly, chaotic and complicated. But if it's like that, then I want out.
Science doesn't make it impossible to believe in God, it just makes it possible not to believe in God
The more we refine our understanding of God to make the concept plausible, the more it seems pointless.
Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough.
I'm afraid that it's not possible to design a defense against every conceivable threat that you can think of.
I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That'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.
Journalists generally have no bias toward one cosmological theory or another, but many have a natural preference for excitement.
[C]reationists [and] other religious enthusiasts [are], in many parts of the world ..., the most dangerous adversaries of science.
If we had the fundamental laws of nature tomorrow, we still wouldn't understand consciousness. We wouldn't even understand turbulence.
Certainly good causes have sometimes been mobilized under the banner of religion, but you find the opposite, I think, more often the case.
Americans swept away the instruments of English hereditary inequality - entails and titles of nobility - even before we had a constitution.
Science should be taught not in order to support religion and not in order to destroy religion. Science should be taught simply ignoring religion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even if there is a God, how do you know that his moral judgments are the correct ones? Seems to me Abraham should have said, 'God, that's just not right.'
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
