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.

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.

This is often the way it is in physics - our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world. Even worse, there often seems to be a general agreement that certain phenomena are just not fit subjects for respectable theoretical and experimental effort.

A theorist today is hardly considered respectable if he or she has not introduced at least one new particle for which there is no experimental evidence.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

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

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.