149 Quotes by Steven Weinberg

The struggle in the seventh century between Roman missionaries and Irish monks for control over the English church was largely a conflict over the date of Easter.

Most scientists I know don’t care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists.

This is one of the great social functions of science – to free people from superstition.

It was essential for the discovery of science that religious ideas be divorced from the study of nature.

No thing happens in vain, but everything for a reason and by necessity.

We on earth do not feel either the gravitational field of the sun or the centrifugal force caused by the earth’s motion around the sun because the two forces balance each other, but this balance would be spoiled if one force was proportional to the mass of the objects on which it acts and the other was not; some objects might then fall off the earth into the sun and others could be thrown off the earth into interstellar space.

Nothing in physics seems so hopeful to as the idea that it is possible for a theory to have a high degree of symmetry was hidden from us in everyday life. The physicist’s task is to find this deeper symmetry.

It is not only in medicine that persons in authority will resist any investigation that might reduce their authority.

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.