Richard Dawkins Quotes - Page 28

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• The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as 'faith'.

  Richard Dawkins

  Doctors, Belief, Patient

  Richard Dawkins (2004). “A Devil's Chaplain”, p.138, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• [The Internet] is by far the most important innovation in the media in my lifetime. It's like having a huge encyclopedia permanently available. There's a tremendous amount of rubbish on the world wide web, but retrieval of what you want to so rapid that it doesn't really matter

  Richard Dawkins

  Media, Innovation, Important

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• Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old.

  Richard Dawkins

  Evolution, Kind, Arise

  Richard Dawkins (2016). “The Selfish Gene”, p.251, Oxford University Press

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• I don't know what to think about magic and fairy tales.

  Richard Dawkins

  Thinking, Magic, Fairy Tale

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• If you were to actually travel around schools and universities and listen in on lectures about evolution you might find a fairly substantial fraction of young people, without knowing what it is they disapprove of, think they disapprove of it, because they've been brought up to.

  Richard Dawkins

  School, Thinking, Knowing

  "People say I'm strident". Interview with Decca Aitkenhead, www.theguardian.com. October 24, 2008.

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• Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything.

  Richard Dawkins

  Roots, Evil, One Thing

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.23, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 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. I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

  Richard Dawkins

  Atheist, Design, Waiting

  "The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design". Book by Richard Dawkins, September 28, 2015.

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• I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research.

  Richard Dawkins

  Thinking, Childhood, Stories

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• Science may be weird and incomprehensible--more weird and less comprehensible than any theology--but science works. It gets results. It can fly you to Saturn, slingshotting you around Venus and Jupiter on the way. We may not understand quantum theory (heaven knows, I don't), but a theory that predicts the real world to ten decimal places cannot in any straightforward sense be wrong.

  Richard Dawkins

  Real, Heaven, Jupiter

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• No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth.

  Richard Dawkins

  Music, Moving, Doubt

  Richard Dawkins (2004). “A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love”, p.143, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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.

  Richard Dawkins

  Religious, Thinking, Opposites

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.25, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

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• I became a little alarmed at the number of my readers who took the meme more positively as a theory of human culture in its own right - either to criticize it (unfairly, given my original modest intention) or to carry it far beyond the limits of what I then thought justified. This was why I may have seemed to backtrack.

  Richard Dawkins

  Numbers, Atheism, Culture

  Richard Dawkins (2004). “A Devil's Chaplain”, p.127, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe.

  Richard Dawkins

  Animal, Complicated, Known

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

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• 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

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• I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.

  Richard Dawkins

  Thinking, Genes, Bigs

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

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• The idea of tiny changes cumulated over many steps is an immensely powerful idea, capable of explaining an enormous range of things that would be otherwise inexplicable.

  Richard Dawkins

  Powerful, Ideas, Tiny

  Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.95, W. W. Norton & Company

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• If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope to eventually understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.

  Richard Dawkins

  Lying, Rainbow, World

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.35, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Society bends over backward to be accommodating to religious sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities. If I say something offensive to religious people, I'll be universally censured, including by many atheists.

  Richard Dawkins

  Religious, Atheist, People

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• Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when.

  Richard Dawkins

  Atheism, Energy, Matter

  Richard Dawkins (2004). “A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The alternative which I favor is to renounce all euphemisms and grasp the nettle of the word atheism itself, precisely because it is a taboo word carrying frissons of hysterical phobia. Critical mass may be harder to achieve than with some non-confrontational euphemism, but if we did achieve it with the dread word atheist, the political impact would be all the greater.

  Richard Dawkins

  Atheist, Impact, Political

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• Luke [the gospel writer] screws up his dating by tactlessly mentioning events that historians are capable of independently checking. There was indeed a census under Governor Quirinius - a local census, not one decreed by Caesar Augustus for the Empire as a whole - but it happened too late in 6 AD, long after Herod's death.

  Richard Dawkins

  Dating, Long, Religion

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• 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

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• Let us understand Darwinism so we can walk in the opposite direction when it comes to setting up society.

  Richard Dawkins

  Opposites, Walks, Settings

  "Eden and Evolution". Interview with Shankar Vedantam, www.washingtonpost.com. February 5, 2006.

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• Either it is true that a medicine works or it isn't. It cannot be false in the ordinary sense but true in some alternative sense. If a therapy or treatment is anything more than a placebo, properly conducted double-blind trials, statistically analyzed, will eventually bring it through with flying colours. Many candidates for recognition as orthodox medicines fail the test and are summarily dropped. The alternative label should not (though, alas, it does) provide immunity from the same fate.

  Richard Dawkins

  Fate, Medicine, Flying

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