Richard Dawkins Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
“I do believe that nice religious people make the world safe for extremists by teaching us that faith is a virtue, that there's something good about holding beliefs without any substantiating evidence, that you believe because you believe. Once you buy into that, then the door is opened to extremists who defend their extremism by saying, 'Oh well, it's my faith, you can't touch it, you can't criticise my faith, I don't even need to defend it because faith is faith.'”
-- Richard Dawkins -
“Religion: Together we can find the cure.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
“Religion has been a powerful weapon in the hands of governments, in the hands of priests, in the hands of kings who have used it as a weapon to keep down the populace. It is a wonderful way of disciplining people and making them do what you want, to tell them that if they don't do what you want they will, for example, go to Hell.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
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“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 -
“Commonsense lets us down, because commonsense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large; the mundane world of the familiar.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
“It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
“There's a natural tendency for children to, in some sense, inherit the cultural values of their parents. I'm not against that, that's fine, that's wonderful. What I am against is labelling. Nobody ever labels a child a cricketer because his father is a cricketer, but they do label a child a Catholic because his parents are Catholic. I think it's more or less unique. Nobody ever labels a child a socialist or a conservative or a liberal because that's what their parents are.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
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“People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you'd never be confident of things like 'My wife loves me'. But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn't purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
“I'd like everybody to be secular. I suppose I have to say politically I would like religion to become gentler and nicer and to stop interfering with other people's lives, stop repressing women, stop indoctrinating children, all that sort of thing. But I really, really would like to see religion go away altogether.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
“Some sort of belief in all-powerful supernatural beings is common, if not universal. A tendency to obey authority, perhaps especially in children, a tendency to believe what you're told, a tendency to fear your own death, a tendency to wish to see your loved ones who have died, to wish to see them again, a wish to understand where you came from, where the world came from, all these psychological predispositions, under the right cultural conditions, tend to lead to people believing in things for which there is no evidence.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
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“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
-- Richard DawkinsSource : Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.51, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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“What you cannot have is a gene that sacrifices itself for the benefit of other genes. What you can have is a gene that makes organisms sacrifice themselves for other organisms under the influence of selfish genes.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
“Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
“I think we certainly benefit from social institutions which encourage us towards moral behavior. It's very important to have law. It's very important to have a moral education.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
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“How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.”
-- Richard DawkinsSource : Twitter post from May 22, 2014
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“It's very important to try to inculcate into children moral rules, such as "do as you would be done by."”
-- Richard Dawkins -
“The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
“If I were God wanting to make a human being, I would do it by a more direct way rather than by evolution. Why deliberately set it up in the one way which makes it look as though you don't exist?”
-- Richard Dawkins -
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“It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).”
-- Richard Dawkins -
“I don't understand why so many people who are sophisticated in science go on believing in God. I wish I did.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
“I am thrilled to be alive at time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
“THE MAJORITY of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all”
-- Richard Dawkins -
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“By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
“Religious people are atheists about all other gods, atheists only take it one god further.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
“You can't blame science for being used for evil purposes. What you can do is say, 'This is an exceedingly powerful tool.' And you want to make sure it is used for good purposes, not bad ones. That is a political decision.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
“Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
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“Religion is a powerful weapon that can be used because it persuades people to do things. And thus it can be used for good or ill. But it should not be a powerful weapon at all.”
-- Richard Dawkins -
“Science ha seradicated smallpox, can immunise against most previously deadly viruses, can kill most previously deadly bacteria. Theology has done nothing but talk of pestilence as the wages of sin.”
-- Richard Dawkins
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