Quote

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.

Richard Dawkins

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
Actor
Author
Biologist
Epistemologist
Essayist
Ethologist
Evolutionary Biologist
Geneticist
Science Communicator
Science Writer
Screenwriter
Kenya's capital
Clinton Richard Dawkins
Clinton Dawkins
C. Richard Dawkins
C. Dawkins
CR Dawkins
R. Dawkins
Selfish
Philosophical
Teach
Born
Trying
Altruism
Genes
Generosity

More quotes by Richard Dawkins

Image
Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.
Richard Dawkins
Image
The river of my title is a river of DNA, a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues
Richard Dawkins
Image
Evolution may explain some features of the moral law, but it can't explain why it should have any real significance.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Quantum mechanics, that brilliantly successful flagship theory of modern science, is deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Eastern mystics have always been deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Therefore, Eastern mystics must have been talking about quantum theory all along.
Richard Dawkins
Image
[R]eductionism' is one of those things, like sin, that is only mentioned by people who are against it. To call oneself a reductionist will sound, in some circles, a bit like admitting to eating babies. But, just as nobody actually eats babies, so nobody is really a reductionist in any sense worth being against.
Richard Dawkins
Image
If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don't know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous.
Richard Dawkins
Image
The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.
Richard Dawkins
Image
There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.
Richard Dawkins
Image
There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Yesterday's dangerous idea is today's orthodoxy and tomorrow's cliché.
Richard Dawkins
Image
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
Image
Matthew and Luke handle the problem differently, by deciding that Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem after all. But they get him there by different routes.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years, you get these monsters of improbability, like the human brain and the rain forest. It should warn us against ever again assuming that because something is complicated, God must have done it.
Richard Dawkins
Image
We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.
Richard Dawkins
Image
We're going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.
Richard Dawkins
Image
I'm a sucker for nice religious leaders. I fall for it every time.
Richard Dawkins
Image
I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Ideally, I'd like everybody to be secular.
Richard Dawkins
Image
DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
Richard Dawkins