149 Quotes by Steven Weinberg

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 whole history of the last thousands of years has been a history of religious persecutions and wars, pogroms, jihads, crusades. I find it all very regrettable, to say the least.

Its a consequence of the experience of science. As you learn more and more about the universe, you find you can understand more and more without any reference to supernatural intervention, so you lose interest in that possibility. Most scientists I know dont care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists. And that, I think, is one of the great things about science-that it has made it possible for people not to be religious.

All logical arguments can be defeated by the simple refusal to reason logically

I think enormous harm is done by religion - not just in the name of religion, but actually by religion. ... 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 Isaac because God told him to do that. Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible thing.

A physicist friend of mine once said that in facing death, he drew some consolation from the reflection that he would never again have to look up the word "hermeneutics" in the dictionary.

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.

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.

I enjoy being at a meeting that doesn’t start with an invocation!