Steven Weinberg Quotes

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 religion does not make us better people, it will make us very much worse. And of all the bad men who have lived, the religious "bad man" is the worst of all.

Conscience gets a lot of credit that really belongs to cowardice.

I was brought up to believe that human beings are good, which is why it shocks me to the core when I see human beings behaving badly.

For years I've been interested in a fundamental question concerning what I call the psychology of evil: Why is it that good people do evil deeds? I've been interested in that question since I was a little kid. Growing up in the ghetto in the South Bronx, I had lots of friends who I thought were good kids, but for one reason or another they ended up in serious trouble. They went to jail, they took drugs, or they did terrible things to other people. My whole upbringing was focused on trying to understand what could have made them go wrong.

Every man prefers virtue, when there is not some strong incitement to transgress its precepts.

All human beings search for either reasons to be good, or excuses to be bad.

All religion may be centered around a generally good idea, however, this has not stopped its adherents from acting like bastards.

Behaving morally because of a hope of reward or a fear of punishment is not morality. Morality is not bribery or threats. Religion is bribery and threats. Humans have morality. We don't need religion.

Men's moral principles are weak enough without their being made subordinate to selfishness; and their selfishness is quite active enough, without any such effort as Christianity makes to constitute it the mainspring of all their conduct.

I don't believe that we evolved moral psychology; it just doesn't seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon.

I can understand why people are bad.

People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that.

People don't think of themselves as evil.

It is interesting to ask whether there's any general reason why being religious might make you do nice things or indeed nasty things. It's possible that people do nice things because they're religious. One reason might be they're hoping for a reward in Heaven, which is not a very noble reason.

My only fear is doing something contrary to human nature - the wrong thing, the wrong way, or at the wrong time.

Inasmuch as ill-deeds spring up as a spontaneous crop, they are easy to learn.

Be not familiar with the idea of wrong, for sin in fancy mothers many an ugly fact.

It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.

When, in the present world, men behave well, that is no doubt sometimes because they are creatures of habit as well as, sometimes, because they are reasonable.

In an average moral universal society, good people will try to do the right thing, and psychotic people will do wicked things. But if you want to make good people do wicked things, you need them to be religious.

...And in freedom, most people find sin.

I think that you only occasionally have to play evil because everything you're doing is.

Oh, what a wicked world it is that drives a man to sin.