Richard Dawkins Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.

  Richard Dawkins

  Religious, Book, People

• By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. -this quote is actually found in Carl Sagan's book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, where he attributes it to engineer James Oberg, who says he stole it from someone else.

  Richard Dawkins

  Book, Mean, Dark

• Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different senses.

  Richard Dawkins

  Book, Purpose, Use

  Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.13, W. W. Norton & Company

• The cynic about human nature might say that religious morality is an effective way of keeping people in line. The threat of hell, the reward of heaven, but the rules of the holy books are out of date and often barbaric.

  Richard Dawkins

  Religious, Book, People

• I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content.

  Richard Dawkins

  Book, Loss, Atheism

• Alister McGrath has now written two books with my name in the title. The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, 'was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

  Richard Dawkins

  Dog, Book, Two

• The book is true, and if evidence seems to condtradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out not the book.

  Richard Dawkins

  Book, Evidence, Thrown

• Science is wonderful, science is important, and so are children, so are young people, and so what could be better than to write a science book for young people?

  Richard Dawkins

  Children, Book, Writing

  "The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy" with John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley, www.lightspeedmagazine.com. December 2011.

• We have the same genetic code for all living creatures. We have a large number of genes that are manifestly the same, but with detail differences - they look like different drafts of the same book. In extreme cases, like a human and a beetroot, it's like the difference between Matthew and Luke's Gospel - clearly they tell the same story, but with different words. Whereas with a human and a chimp, it's like two different printings of Matthew, with a few typos in one.

  Richard Dawkins

  Book, Two, Differences

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there's a scientific lesson, for example - when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That's actually very valuable.

  Richard Dawkins

  Book, Example, Fiction

  "Richard Dawkins Keeps Making New Enemies". Interview with Isaac Chotiner, newrepublic.com. October 29, 2013.

• I like to think 'The God Delusion' is a humorous book. I think, actually, it's full of laughs. And people who describe it as a polarizing book or as an aggressive book, it's just that very often they haven't read it.

  Richard Dawkins

  Humorous, Book, Thinking

• Book critics or theatre critics can be derisively negative and gain delighted praise for the trenchant with of their review. But in criticisms of religion even clarity ceases to be a virtue and sounds like aggressive hostility. A politician may attack an opponent scathingly across the floor of the House and earn plaudits for his robust pugnacity. But let a soberly reasoning critic of religion employ what would in other contexts sound merely direct or forthright, and it will be described as a 'rant'.

  Richard Dawkins

  Book, House, Criticism

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.17, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells.

  Richard Dawkins

  Book, Dna, Cells

  "Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder". Richard Dimbleby Lecture on BBC1 Television, www.edge.org. November 12, 1996.

• When I sign books, I get lines of people and what they usually say is: "Thank you. You have changed my life." I am really moved by that.

  Richard Dawkins

  Book, People, Lines

  Source: newrepublic.com

• They are either people of faith who have lost their faith from reading my books, or they are people who had already lost their faith, and something about my books encouraged them to affirm that.

  Richard Dawkins

  Book, Reading, People

  Source: newrepublic.com

• I do like Philip Pullman.And that's an exception because Philip Pullman's books allow magic.

  Richard Dawkins

  Book, Magic, Exception

  Source: newrepublic.com

• Steve Grand is the creator of what I think is the nearest approach to artificial life so far, and his first book, Creation: Life and How to Make It, is as interesting as you would expect. But he illuminates more than just the properties of life: his originality extends to matter itself and the very nature of reality. Not since David Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality have I encountered such a compelling invitation to think everything out afresh, from the bottom up.

  Richard Dawkins

  Book, Reality, Thinking

  "What were you looking at?: A host of celebrity critics choose their books of the year". www.theguardian.com. December 15, 2000.

• There isn't [in new atheism]. Nothing that wasn't in Bertrand Russell or probably Robert Ingersoll. But I suppose it is more of a political effect, in that all these books happened to come out at the same time. I like to think that we have some influence.

  Richard Dawkins

  Book, Thinking, Political

  Source: newrepublic.com

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