Richard Dawkins Quotes About Understanding

Quotes about: Understanding

• 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

  Life, Gratitude, Morning

• I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

  Richard Dawkins

  Death, Atheist, Learning

  "The Two Types of Faith" by Greg Cootsona, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 17, 2016.

• My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.

  Richard Dawkins

  Feelings, Understanding, Atheism

• The true scientific understanding of the nature of existence is so utterly fascinating; how could you not want people to share it? Carl Sagan, I think, said 'when you're in love, you want to tell the world.' And who, on understanding a scientific view of reality, would not, as it were, fall in love and want to tell the world.

  Richard Dawkins

  Falling In Love, Love You, Reality

• Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.

  Richard Dawkins

  Atheist, Understanding, Religion

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.151, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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

  Understanding, Humanity, Alive

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.420, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• What has happened is that genetics has become a branch of information technology. It is pure information. It's digital information. It's precisely the kind of information that can be translated digit for digit, byte for byte, into any other kind of information and then translated back again. This is a major revolution. I suppose it's probably "the" major revolution in the whole history of our understanding of ourselves. It's something would have boggled the mind of Darwin, and Darwin would have loved it, I'm absolutely sure.

  Richard Dawkins

  Technology, Understanding, Mind

  "Life: A gene-centric view". Craig Venter and Richard Dawkins: A Conversation in Munich, www.edge.org. January 23, 2008.

• Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. Mindless may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from. It came from religion.

  Richard Dawkins

  New York, People, Leader

• That there is a continuous link from humans to gorillas, with the intermediate species merely long dead, is beyond the understanding of speciesists. Tie the label Homo sapiens even to a tiny piece of insensible embryonic tissue, and its life suddenly leaps to infinite, incomputable value.... Self-styled pro-lifers, and others that indulge in footling debates about exactly when in its development a foetus becomes human, exhibit the same discontinuous mentality. Human, to the discontinuous mind, is an absolutist concept. There can be no half measures. And from this flows much evil.

  Richard Dawkins

  Self, Indulge In, Ties

• You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world, you also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.

  Richard Dawkins

  Giving, Understanding, Tutorial

  "The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder". BBC1 Television, November 12, 1996.

• Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.

  Richard Dawkins

  Understanding, Way, Sometimes

• I think the world's always a better place if people are filled with understanding.

  Richard Dawkins

  Thinking, People, Understanding

• It is quite true that many scientists, many physicists, maintain that the physical constants, the half dozen or so numbers that physicists have to simply assume in order to derive the rest of their understanding ... have to be assumed. You can't provide a rationale for why those numbers are there. Physicists have calculated that if any of these numbers was a little bit different, the universe as we know it wouldn't exist.

  Richard Dawkins

  Numbers, Order, Understanding

• I think we have got to start again and go right back to first principles. The argument I shall advance, surprising as it may seem coming from the author of the earlier chapters, is that, for an understanding of the evolution of modern man, we must begin by throwing out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas on evolution. If there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports? ... Is he manuvering to maximize David Attenborough's television ratings?

  Richard Dawkins

  Sports, Men, Thinking

  Richard Dawkins (2006). “The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary edition”, p.191, OUP Oxford

• I doubt that religion can survive deep understanding. The shallows are its natural habitat. Cranks and fundamentalists are too often victimised as scapegoats for religion in general. It is only quite recently that Christianity reinvented itself in non-fundamentalist guise, and Islam has yet to do so.

  Richard Dawkins

  Business, Believe, Deep Understanding

• There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.

  Richard Dawkins

  Understanding

  Source: inters.org

• Evolution is a very, very important idea. It is the explanation for all of life - a stunningly simple, yet powerful explanation. If you think about it, before Darwin, we hadn't the foggiest idea of how we came into being. Now we do. It's still such an exciting idea that it is well worth everybody understanding it.

  Richard Dawkins

  Powerful, Simple, Thinking

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing - a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe.

  Richard Dawkins

  Believe, Giving, Understanding

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