“It becomes very tempting to ask whether, in principle, it's possible to create a universe in the laboratory—or a universe in your backyard—by man-made processes.”

Interview with Rynn Berry in The Vegetarians https://books.google.it/books?id=vK_uAAAAMAAJ (1979), p. 64<!-- Brookline, MA: Autumn Press -->
Context: Man is innately a creature of love. That love is the most powerful force in the universe, and eventually — it's a very slow process — it will conquer. I think there will come a time, and this is down the road a great many years, when civilized people will look back in horror on our generation and the ones that have preceded it: the idea that we should eat other living things running around on four legs, that we should raise them just for the purpose of killing them! The people of the future will say “meat-eaters!” in disgust and regard us in the same way that we regard cannibals and cannibalism.

The Widow's Son

Variant: In the beginning the Universe was created.
This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
Source: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Bennington College address (1970)
Context: The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage — and his children, and his cities, too. Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe. Still — I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation of appreciation of art.

A Man Said to the Universe, No. 20
War Is Kind and Other Lines (1899)
Source: War Is Kind and Other Poems

Source: Evolution and Theology (1900), p. 22.