Steven Weinberg Quotes

In religious and in secular affairs, the more fervent beliefs attract followers. If you are a moderate in any respect - if you're a moderate on abortion, if you're a moderate on gun control, or if you're a moderate in your religious faith - it doesn't evolve into a crusade where you're either right or wrong, good or bad, with us or against us.

You're always going to have extremists in every religion.

Religions are, for the most part, bad. But religion is not.

I personally am not religious. I think, put into the wrong hands, it's incredibly dangerous. It's the reason for most of the wars that have been fought around the world, and it's pretty ridiculous when you think about what they're actually arguing over.

Religious extremism. We hear about it all the time. We see it all the time. Heck, most of us are just sick of talking about it all the time.

Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.

That religious earnestness forever tends toward fright and hence towards brittleness and inquisition is clear enough in mythology and history.

The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good.

A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world.

All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.

Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

I don't believe that if you do good, good things will happen. Everything is completely accidental and random. Sometimes bad things happen to very good people and sometimes good things happen to bad people. But at least if you try to do good things, then you're spending your time doing something worthwhile.

I enjoy being Jewish, but I'm an atheist... I hate fundamentalism in all its forms. Jews, Catholics, Baptists, I think they are all potty and capable of destroying the world.

Religion can be both good and bad - it is spirituality that counts.

How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?

Religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women, and coercive toward children.

Obstinacy in religious understanding leads to backwardness as in Muslims’, prevalence of violence and intolerance.

Over the course of history many religions have fallen victim to violent interpretations.

There is no pestilence in a state like a zeal for religion, independent of morality.

It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and ... people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.

Religion can turn holy stories into flaming swords.

Here [in Jerusalem], no mercy is shown. One hates one's fellow man to the glory of God.

Religion has both bolstered and undermined stable self-government. It has advanced political reform and human rights, but also induced irrationality, extremism, and terrorism.

Terrorists have hijacked our religion.