I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That's a good thing.

If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there'd be a shortage of fishing poles.

The idea that no one is perfect is a view most commonly held by people with no grandchildren.

There must be a happy medium somewhere between being totally informed and blissfully unaware.

Life expectancy would grow by leaps and bounds if green vegetables smelled as good as bacon.

It's your ability to inspire and uplift other people that matters, not your ability to outdo them.

Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk.

Quantum field theory, which was born just fifty years ago from the marriage of quantum mechanics with relativity, is a beautiful but not very robust child.

Science is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.

For good people to do evil things, it takes religion.

As for me, I have just enough confidence about the multiverse to bet the lives of both Andrei Linde and Martin Rees’s dog.

Journalists generally have no bias toward one cosmological theory or another, but many have a natural preference for excitement.

My advice is to go for the messes - that's where the action is.

On balance the moral influence of religion has been awful.

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

Our job in physics is to see things simply, to understand a great many complicated phenomena in a unified way, in terms of a few simple principles.

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.

The more comprehensible the universe becomes the more pointless it seems.

Elementary particles are terribly boring, which is one reason why we're so interested in them.