  As a tribute to Steven Weinberg, we summarize the immense impact that he had
on the understanding of the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking and on
the physics of the Higgs boson. In particular, four landmark contributions to
this field are highlighted. A first one is his early work with Goldstone and
Salam on spontaneously broken continuous symmetries that paved the way to the
Higgs mechanism. A second towering breakthrough is his model of leptons which
later became the Standard Model of particle physics and for which he was
awarded the Nobel prize with Glashow and Salam. A third seminal work is the
so-called Weinberg-Linde lower bound on the Higgs boson mass that was derived
from the requirement of the stability of the electroweak vacuum. Finally, we
will summarize his important contributions in model-building of new physics
with extended Higgs sectors and their possible impact in flavor physics and
CP-violation. The historical aspects as well as the contemporary way of viewing
these four major topics are summarized and their impact on today Higgs physics,
and more generally particle physics, is highlighted.
