Richard Dawkins Quotes - Page 28

Quotes about:

• Time and again, my sociobiological colleagues have upbraided me as a turncoat, because I will not agree with them that the ultimate criterion for the success of a meme must be its contribution to Darwinian "fitness". At bottom, they insist, a "good meme" spreads because brains are receptive to it, and the receptiveness of brains is ultimately shaped by (genetic) natural selection.

  Richard Dawkins

  Brain, Natural, Criteria

  Richard Dawkins (2016). “The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene”, p.167, Oxford University Press

  4 Copy quote

• You can't imagine how gratifying it is to have a reader come up to you and say, 'You changed my life.'

  Richard Dawkins

  Up To You, Imagine, You Changed

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

• They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

  Richard Dawkins

  Names, Long, Survival

  Richard Dawkins (2016). “The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary edition”, p.41, Oxford University Press

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance.

  Richard Dawkins

  Design, Vengeance, Vicious

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.146, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our Christian-inspired attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote can arouse more moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivasection of any number of intelligent adult chimpanzees! The only reason we can be comfortable with such a double standard is that the intermediates between humans and chimps are all dead.

  Richard Dawkins

  Christian, Attitude, Intelligent

  "The Blind Watchmaker". Book by Richard Dawkins, 1986.

  7 Copy quote

• However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747

  Richard Dawkins

  Boeing, Designer, Entity

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.138, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• In the beginning was simplicity.

  Richard Dawkins

  Simplicity

  Richard Dawkins (2016). “The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary edition”, p.34, Oxford University Press

  4 Copy quote

• Reductionism is a dirty word, and a kind of 'holistier than thou' self-righteousness has become fashionable.

  Richard Dawkins

  Dirty, Self, Kind

  Richard Dawkins (2016). “The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene”, p.172, Oxford University Press

  8 Copy quote

• I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.

  Richard Dawkins

  Country, Names, Parent

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• I was confirmed at my prep school at the age of 13.

  Richard Dawkins

  Birthday, School, Age

  4 Copy quote

• I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.

  Richard Dawkins

  Christian, Want, Our Society

  "Dawkins: I'm a Cultural Christian". news.bbc.co.uk. December 10, 2007.

  4 Copy quote

• I love romantic poetry.

  Richard Dawkins

  Romantic Love, Romantic Poetry

  "Darwin's child" by Simon Hattenstone, www.theguardian.com. February 10, 2003.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• I am not advocating a morality based on evolution.

  Richard Dawkins

  Religion, Atheism, Morality

  Richard Dawkins (2016). “The Selfish Gene”, p.3, Oxford University Press

  10 Copy quote

• Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence.

  Richard Dawkins

  Mean, Atheism, Orbit

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  11 Copy quote

Page 28 of 32

First

← Prev

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin