Richard Dawkins Quotes

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Quotes About Richard Dawkins

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I don't think that it's up to government to dictate what people should wear. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
The arms race between [predators] and [prey] is asymmetric, in which success on either side is felt as failure by the other side, but the nature of the success and failure on the two sides is very different. The two sides are 'trying' to do very different things. [Predators] are trying to eat [prey]. [Prey] are not trying to eat [predators], they are trying to avoid being eaten by [predators].
From an evolutionary point of view asymmetric arms races are more [likely] to generate highly complex weapons systems. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
I great difficulty having any respect for a religion that has so little confidence in the truth of its beliefs that it feels reduced to using threats in order to propagate those beliefs. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
What, after all, is so special about genes? The answer is that they are replicators. The laws of physics are supposed to be true all over the accessible universe. Are there any principles of biology which are likely to have similar universal validity? When astronauts voyage to distant planets and look for life, they can expect to find creatures too strange and unearthly for us to imagine. But is there anything which must be true of all life, wherever it is found, and whatever the basis of its chemistry? If forms of life exist whose chemistry is based on silicon rather than carbon, or ammonia rather than water, if creatures are discovered which boil to death at -100 degrees centigrade, if a form of life is found which is not based on chemistry at all, but on electronic reverberating circuits, will there still be any general principle which is true of all life? Obviously I do not know but, if I had to bet, I would put my money on one fundamental principle. This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity which prevails on our own planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to becomethe basis for an evolutionary process. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
If a group of atoms in the presence of energy falls into a stable pattern it will tend to stay that way. The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no mystery about this. It had to happen by definition. From this, of course, it does not follow that you can explain the existence of entities as complex as man by exactly the same principles on their own. It is no good taking the right number of atoms and shaking them together with some external energy till they happen to fall into the right pattern, and out drops Adam! ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
Just as I wouldn't expect a gynecologist to have a debate with somebody who believes in the Stork-theory of reproduction, I won't do debates with Young Earth creationists. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think that the Universe began after the domestication of the dog? ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
decade after the first edition of this book was published, Yan Wong and I met in the fitting surroundings of the Oxford Museum of Natural History to discuss the possibility of producing a new, tenth anniversary edition. Yan, once my undergraduate pupil, had been employed as my research assistant during the writing of the original edition, before he left for his lecturing position in Leeds and his career as a television presenter. He played an enormously important part in the conception and execution of the first edition, and he was credited as joint author of several of the chapters. During the course of our discussion ten years on, we realised that much new information had come in, especially from the molecular genetics laboratories of the world. Yan undertook the bulk of the revision and I proposed to the publisher that this time he should be properly credited as joint author of the whole book. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
If you feel trapped in the religion of your upbringing, it would be worth asking yourself how this came about. The answer is usually some form of childhood indoctrination. If you are religious at all it is overwhelmingly probable that your religion is that of your parents. If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination. Mutatis mutandis if you were born in Afghanistan. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
There are more cells in your brain than there are brains in your entire body. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
36. Argument from Incomplete Devastation: A plane crashed killing 143 passengers and crew. But one child survived with only third-degree burns. Therefore God exists. 37. Argument from Possible Worlds: If things had been different, then things would be different. That would be bad. Therefore God exists. 38. Argument from Sheer Will: I do believe in God! I do believe in God! I do I do I do. I do believe in God! Therefore God exists. 39. Argument from Non-belief: The majority of the world's population are non-believers in Christianity. This is just what Satan intended. Therefore God exists. 40. Argument from Post-Death Experience: Person X died an atheist. He now realizes his mistake. Therefore God exists. 41. Argument from Emotional Blackmail: God loves you. How could you be so heartless as not to believe in him? Therefore God exists. THE ~ Richard Dawkins
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The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
We have all been guilty of bending over backwards to be nice to an unworthy but powerful opponent, ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
I would like people to appreciate science in the same way they appreciate the arts. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
There is something distinctly odd about the argument, however. Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don't. Pascal's Wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he'd see through the deception. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complex that it must include a model of itself. ~ Richard Dawkins
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The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the U.S. leads the world by miles. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
When we look at a solid lump of iron or rock, we are 'really' looking at what is almost entirely empty space. It looks and feels solid and opaque because our sensory systems and brains find it convenient to treat it as solid and opaque. It is convenient for the brain to represent a rock as solid because we can't walk through it. 'Solid' is our way of experiencing things that we can't walk through or fall throug, because of the electromagnetic forces between atoms. 'Opaque' is the experience we have when light bounces off the surface of an object, and none of it goes through. ~ Richard Dawkins
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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
It is in the light of the unparalleled presumption of respect for religion* that I make my own disclaimer for this book. I shall not go out of my way to offend, but nor shall I don kid gloves to handle religion any more gently than I would handle anything else. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
You can never be absolutely certain that anything doesn't exist. But you can show that it's unlikely. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
As Einstein said, 'If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. ' Michael Shermer, In The Science of Good and Evil, calls it a debate stopper. If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder', you reveal yourself as an immoral person, 'and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you'. If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good. ~ Richard Dawkins
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As my colleague, the physical chemist Peter Atkins, puts it, we must be equally agnostic about the theory that there is a teapot in orbrit around the planet Pluto. We can't disprove it. But that doesn't mean the theory that there is a teapot is on level terms with the theory that there isn't. ~ Richard Dawkins
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After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked - as I am surprisingly often - why I bother to get up in the mornings. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Relatives share a substantial proportion of their genes. Each selfish gene therefore has its loyalties divided between different bodies. ~ Richard Dawkins
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I think that people in the Bible Belt are far less monolithically religious than many people imagine. There are lots and lots of people who are free-thinking, secularists, or atheists in the so-called Bible Belt. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
Being dead will be no different from being unborn
I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There is nothing to fear in that. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
The priests of the different religious sects . . . dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live. - THOMAS JEFFERSON ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
[A] proper understanding of the magnificence of the real world, while never becoming a religion, can fill the inspirational role that religion has historically - and inadequately -
usurped. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
Most thoughtful people would agree that morality in the absence of policing is somehow more truly moral than the kind of false morality that vanishes as soon as the police go on strike or the spy camera is switched off, whether the spy camera is a real one monitored in the police station or an imaginary one in heaven. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong. ~ Richard Dawkins
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The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal - God is the Omnipotent Father - hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. - GORE VIDAL ~ Richard Dawkins
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If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it's not supernatural. ~ Richard Dawkins
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I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organised ignorance. ~ Richard Dawkins
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A tiger's DNA is also a 'duplicate me' program but it contains an almost fantastically large digression as an essential part of the efficient execution of its fundamental message. That digression is a tiger, complete with fangs, claws, running muscles, stalking and pouncing instincts. The tiger's DNA says, 'Duplicate me by the round-about route of building a tiger first.' At the same time, antelope DNA says, 'Duplicate me by the round-about route of building an antelope first, complete with long legs and fast muscles, complete with timorous instincts and finely honed sense organs tuned to the danger from tigers. ~ Richard Dawkins
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What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a 'spark of life.' It is information, words, instructions ... If you want to understand life, don't think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born ~ Richard Dawkins
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The Bible is a blueprint of in-group morality, complete with instructions for genocide, enslavement of out-groups, and world domination. But the Bible is not evil by virtue of its objectives or even its glorification of murder, cruelty, and rape. Many ancient works do that - The Iliad, the Icelandic Sagas, the tales of the ancient Syrians and the inscriptions of the ancient Mayans, for example. But no one is selling the Iliad as a foundation for morality. Therein lies the problem. The Bible is sold, and bought, as a guide to how people should live their ~ Richard Dawkins
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Religious organisations have an automatic tax-free charitable status. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Natural selection is anything but random. ~ Richard Dawkins
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What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue? ~ Richard Dawkins
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Sometimes in life it is a good idea to stop,sometimes it is a good idea to go on. The trick is to decide when to stop ~ Richard Dawkins
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I'm a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don't know it. ~ Richard Dawkins
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I do understand people when they say that you destroy the magic of childhood if you encourage too much skeptical questioning. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Textbooks describe DNA as a blueprint for a body. It's better seen as a recipe for making a body, because it is irreversible. But today I want to present it as something different again, and even more intriguing. The DNA in you is a coded description of ancient worlds in which your ancestors lived. DNA is the wisdom out of the old days, and I mean very old days indeed. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Either blasphemy is a victimless crime or its victim is powerful enough to take care of himself without any help from you. ~ Richard Dawkins
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You believe that all humanity came from Adam and Eve, and humans have not evolved at all since. So tell me; between the two of them, which was black, which was white, and which was Asian? ~ Richard Dawkins
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An amusing, if rather pathetic, case study in miracles is the Great Prayer Experiment: does praying for patients help them recover? Prayers are commonly offered for sick people, both privately and in formal places of worship. Darwin's cousin Francis Galton was the first to analyse scientifically whether praying for people is efficacious. He noted that every Sunday, in churches throughout Britain, entire congregations prayed publicly for the health of the royal family. Shouldn't they, therefore, be unusually fit, compared with the rest of us, who are prayed for only by our nearest and dearest?* Galton looked into it, and found no statistical difference. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are serviley crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
- Thomas Jefferson ~ Richard Dawkins
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The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. - RALPH WALDO EMERSON ~ Richard Dawkins
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There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another. ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes. ~ Richard Dawkins
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The whole purpose of our search for a 'unit of selection' is to discover a suitable actor to play the leading role in our metaphors of purpose. ~ Richard Dawkins
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I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further. ~ Richard Dawkins
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I should have been put down at birth. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Labelling of children. Children are described as 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' etc. from an early age, and certainly far too early for them to have made up their own minds on what they think about religion. ~ Richard Dawkins
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I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops. ~ Richard Dawkins
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version of Kurt Wise's manifesto: 'If all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism, I would be the first to admit it, and I would immediately change my mind. As things stand, however, all available evidence (and there is a vast amount of it) favours evolution. It is for this reason and this reason alone that I argue for evolution with a passion that matches the passion of those who argue against it. My passion is based on evidence. Theirs, flying in the face of evidence as it does, is truly fundamentalist.' I'm an atheist myself, but religion is here to stay. Live with it. 'You want to get rid of religion? Good luck to you! You think ~ Richard Dawkins
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Our imaginations are not yet tooled-up to penetrate the neighbourhood of the quantum. Nothing at that scale behaves in the way matter - as we are evolved to think - ought to behave. Nor can we cope with the behaviour of objects that move at some appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Common sense lets us down, because common sense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Mr. Dawkins' assertions are self-refuting- ie. Actual infinity vs. potential infinity easily makes the most reasonable argument for theism and a Deity. Now, the argument for the Creator God of Christianity requires much more time, energy, and logical effort."


~R. Alan Woods [2007] ~ R. Alan Woods
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False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment. ~ Richard Dawkins
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I think what I'd really like to see would be a mass consciousness-raising movement so that we would all become vegetarian. ~ Richard Dawkins
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There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once. ~ Richard Dawkins
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There is absolutely no reason to believe that those things for which science does not yet have natural explanations will turn out to be of supernatural origin, any more than volcanoes or earthquakes or diseases turn out to be caused by angry deities, as people once believed they were. Of ~ Richard Dawkins
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An itinerant selfish gene/ Said 'bodies a- plenty I've seen./ You think you're so clever/ But I'll live for ever./ You're just a survival machine. ~ Richard Dawkins
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No doubt this works well enough for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I can readily see that 'The Selfish Gene' on its own, without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequate impression of its contents. ~ Richard Dawkins
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The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Darwin himself said as much: 'If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.' Darwin could find no such case, and nor has anybody since Darwin's time, despite strenuous, indeed desperate, efforts. Many candidates for this holy grail of creationism have been proposed. None has stood up to analysis. ~ Richard Dawkins
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You can't be a part-time Richard Dawkins. ~ David Mitchell
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I can handle heckling on evolution because it's my own field. ~ Richard Dawkins
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What is illiberal is not persuasion but imposition of one's views. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Let our tribute to the dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe. ~ Richard Dawkins
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If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature. ~ Richard Dawkins
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tried to impose 'intelligent design' creationism on the science curriculum of a local public school - a move of 'breathtaking inanity', to quote Judge Jones ~ Richard Dawkins
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The denouement is perhaps the most moving scene of her show Letting Go of God. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Non-existent male? I suppose that, in the ditzily ~ Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins quotes by Richard Dawkins
I don't give a damn for anybody's opinion, I only care about the facts. So I'm not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where factual matters are concerned. ~ Richard Dawkins
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The Madingley paper56 represented a kind of closure for me, a climax to the first part of my scientific career, beginning in my early twenties and ending in my early thirties. At this point, I took off in an entirely new direction, never to return to those youthful mathematical pastures. That new direction, which was to define the rest of my career, and approximately the second half of my life, opened up with the publication of my first book, The Selfish Gene. ~ Richard Dawkins
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DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. ~ Richard Dawkins
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However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or
complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't
this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who will
never even be offered life in the first place? ~ Richard Dawkins
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The state of Israel seems to owe its very existence to the American Jewish vote, while at the same time consigning the non-religious to political oblivion. ~ Richard Dawkins
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What's going to happen when I die? I may be buried, or I may be cremated, I may give my body to science. I haven't decided yet. ~ Richard Dawkins
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Not to grow up properly is to retain our 'caterpillar' quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our caterpillar nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists and quacks. The genius of the human child, mental caterpillar extraordinary, is for soaking up information and ideas, not for criticizing them. If critical faculties later grow it will be in spite of, not because of, the inclinations of childhood. The blotting paper of the child's brain is the unpromising seedbed, the base upon which later the sceptical attitude, like a struggling mustard plant, may possibly grow. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive scepticism of adult science. ~ Richard Dawkins
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All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though. ~ Richard Dawkins
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I wouldn't want to have the thought police going to people's homes, dictating what they teach their children. I don't want to be Big Brotherish. I would hate that. ~ Richard Dawkins
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The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity. ~ Richard Dawkins
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