Steven Weinberg

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

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.

One thing that is clearly not maximized by free markets is equality. I am talking not about that pale substitute for equality known as equality of opportunity but about equality itself.

Whatever faith you have you ought to be willing to confront it with the discoveries of science. There's something ignoble about not being willing to look at what we've found about the way the world is and trying to reconcile it with whatever you've decided to believe in for yourself.

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

If any one idea can justly be called the American idea, it is that a child's circumstances at birth should not determine the station in life that that child will occupy as an adult.

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.

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.

In my experience, many Americans think of religion as important and want to do whatever they can to support it. But if you ask them what they themselves believe, you'll find they're very uncertain about their religious beliefs. They don't actually accept the theology of their official church.

If we had the fundamental laws of nature tomorrow, we still wouldn't understand consciousness. We wouldn't even understand turbulence.

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

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.