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It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.

Richard Dawkins

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Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
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More quotes by Richard Dawkins

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Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don't know it.
Richard Dawkins
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I am not advocating a morality based on evolution.
Richard Dawkins
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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
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I am utterly fed up with the respect we have been brainwashed into bestowing upon religion.
Richard Dawkins
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Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that.
Richard Dawkins
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Religion has been a powerful weapon in the hands of governments, in the hands of priests, in the hands of kings who have used it as a weapon to keep down the populace. It is a wonderful way of disciplining people and making them do what you want, to tell them that if they don't do what you want they will, for example, go to Hell.
Richard Dawkins
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The present Luddism over genetic engineering may die a natural death as the computer-illiterate generation is superseded.... I fear that, if the green movement's high-amplitude warnings over GMOs turn out to be empty, people will be dangerously disinclined to listen to other and more serious warnings.
Richard Dawkins
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Sometimes in life it is a good idea to stop,sometimes it is a good idea to go on. The trick is to decide when to stop
Richard Dawkins
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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.
Richard Dawkins
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Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins.
Richard Dawkins
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There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.
Richard Dawkins
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After sleeping through a hundred million centuries, we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life.
Richard Dawkins
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My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.
Richard Dawkins
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Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.
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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All qualified physicists, biologists, cosmologists and geologists agree, on the basis of massive, mutually corroborating evidence, that the earth's age is at least four billion years.
Richard Dawkins
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It is interesting to ask whether there's any general reason why being religious might make you do nice things or indeed nasty things. It's possible that people do nice things because they're religious. One reason might be they're hoping for a reward in Heaven, which is not a very noble reason.
Richard Dawkins
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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
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The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans.
Richard Dawkins
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If I were God wanting to make a human being, I would do it by a more direct way rather than by evolution. Why deliberately set it up in the one way which makes it look as though you don't exist?
Richard Dawkins