It is almost irrestible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning.
Interpretation
Humans tend to believe they have a unique purpose in the universe, rather than being random products of chance.
In this quote, Steven Weinberg expresses the common human inclination to see ourselves as having a special role in the cosmos, rather than perceiving our existence as merely a result of a series of fortuitous events. This reflects a deeper existential desire to find meaning and purpose in life, contrasting the scientific understanding of our origins with a longing for significance in a vast universe.
In practice
This quote could inspire a discussion in a philosophy class about the nature of existence.
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.
Americans swept away the instruments of English hereditary inequality - entails and titles of nobility - even before we had a constitution.
It's very difficult to convince other countries that they shouldn't pursue nuclear weapons programs if we ourselves are actively developing a component of a strategic defense system.
[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
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.
I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just... you know after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, haven't we outgrown all this? Do we have to listen to this?
The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people's interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise
So for a good old-gentlemanly vice, I think I must take up with avarice.
When a man was hurt you took him to the maester, but what could you do when your maester was hurt?
For as men in battle are continually in the way of shot, so we, in this world, are ever within the reach of Temptation.
Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality.
Turn in upon yourselves, get into your closets, and now resolve to dwell there. You have been strangers to this work too long; you have kept other vineyards too long; you have trifled about the borders of religion too long. Will you now resolve to look better to your hearts? Will you hate and come out of the crowds of business and clamors of the world and retire yourselves more than you have done? Oh, that this day you would resolve upon it!
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