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The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

Richard Dawkins

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Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
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Kenya's capital
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Curiosity
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More quotes by Richard Dawkins

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Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all independently just happening to fit the bill.
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To fill a world with ... religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.
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If saying that religion should be a private matter and should not have special influence in public life is illiberal, then 74% of U.K. Christians are illiberal, too.
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You believe that all humanity came from Adam and Eve, and humans have not evolved at all since. So tell me between the two of them, which was black, which was white, and which was Asian?
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Molecular genetics can show off some surprising relationships like, for example, the close relationship of whales to hippopotamuses, which I think nobody ever guessed until molecular data was looked at. The closest relatives of whales are hippopotamuses, even closer than any other cloven-hoofed animals.
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Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.
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My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
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Nobody would seriously describe a tiny child as a Marxist child or an Anarchist child or a Post-modernist child. Yet children are routinely labelled with the religion of their parents. We need to encourage people to think carefully before labelling any child too young to know their own opinions and our adverts will help to do that.
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Gould carried the art of bending over backward to positively supine lengths. Why shouldn't we comment on God, as scientists? ... A universe with a creative superintendent would be a very different kind of universe from one without. Why is that not a scientific matter?
Richard Dawkins
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Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.
Richard Dawkins
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The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling - though not to me.
Richard Dawkins
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The universe doesn't owe you a sense of hope
Richard Dawkins
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[Richard Leakey is] a robust hero of a man, who actually lives up to the cliché, “a big man in every sense of the word.” Like other big men he is loved by many, feared by some, and not over-preoccupied with the judgments of any.
Richard Dawkins
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However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who will never even be offered life in the first place?
Richard Dawkins
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There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists.
Richard Dawkins
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Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them. [...] Since a principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.
Richard Dawkins
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There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?
Richard Dawkins
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The distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you'd expect if evolution was a fact. The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction.
Richard Dawkins
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The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear.
Richard Dawkins
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If it suits [God] to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation?
Richard Dawkins