You know, our fundamentalist friends dislike the teaching of evolution in schools because of the effect they feel it has on our view of our own special importance, while liberals insist that scientific and spiritual matters can be kept in separate compartments. On this point, I tend to agree with the fundamentalists, though I come to opposite conclusions about teaching evolution because I am convinced it's true.

Sometimes nature seems more beautiful than strictly necessary.

It was one time when people thought the value of the fine structure constant was important. Now of course it's still important, of course, as a practical matter,but we now know that the value it has is a function, that in any fundamental theory you derive the fine structure constant as a function of all sorts of mass ratios and so on and it's not really that fundamental.

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

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.

Rational argument can be defeated by refusing to argue rationally.

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.