If any one idea can justly be called the American idea, it is that a child's circumstances at birth should not determine the station in life that that child will occupy as an adult.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the belief that a child's future should not be dictated by their socio-economic background at birth.
Steven Weinberg's quote reflects a fundamental principle of equality and opportunity in American society. It advocates for the idea that every child, regardless of their circumstances at birth, should have the chance to rise and succeed based on their abilities and efforts, rather than being limited by their initial socio-economic conditions.
In practice
During a speech about education reform, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of equal opportunities for all children.
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 opposite of compromise is character.
All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.
I think seriousness is a mask of self-importance and self-importance in turn is a mask for self-pity. So if you're really going to pursue a spiritual way of living in the world, you must be lighthearted and carefree, have humor, be able to tolerate ambiguity and embrace uncertainty, and be forgiving of yourself and everybody else.
Americans have a severe disease - worse than AIDS. It's called the winner's complex.
There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.
No tyranny is more cruel than the one practised in the shadow of the laws and under color of justice - when, so to speak, one proceeds to drown the unfortunate on the very plank by which they had saved themselves. And since a tyrant never lacks instruments for his tyranny, Tiberius always found judges ready to condemn as many people as he might suspect.
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