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Sometimes I think it's possible to mistake desire for clarity and talking in a no-nonsense way for aggression.
Richard Dawkins
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Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
Actor
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Biologist
Epistemologist
Essayist
Ethologist
Evolutionary Biologist
Geneticist
Science Communicator
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Kenya's capital
Clinton Richard Dawkins
Clinton Dawkins
C. Richard Dawkins
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Talking
Desire
Sometimes
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Nonsense
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Possible
More quotes by Richard Dawkins
Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven.
Richard Dawkins
In true natural selection, if a body has what it takes to survive, its genes automatically survive because they are inside it. So the genes that survive tend to be, automatically, those genes that confer on bodies the qualities that assist them to survive.
Richard Dawkins
Suppose that there's a gene that makes you gay if you were bottle-fed but that has some completely different effect if you were breast-fed. So in the days before bottles were invented that gene would not have manifested itself as gay behavior, but now that bottles are common it can do so.
Richard Dawkins
My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
Richard Dawkins
In two senses: One is that you cannot go on the street and shout that you are an atheist, the other is that you are never given the intellectual framework for calling your faith into question.
Richard Dawkins
All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.
Richard Dawkins
Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once.
Richard Dawkins
I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when you're being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have to improvise, you can change sentences around, and they're not exactly right.
Richard Dawkins
Even those who do not, or cannot, avail themselves of a scientific education, choose to benefit from the technology that is made possible by the scientific education of others.
Richard Dawkins
An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Richard Dawkins
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
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
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
Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it.
Richard Dawkins
I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true.
Richard Dawkins
I hope nobody is seriously suggesting that we get our morals from scripture because if we did we'd be stoning people for working on the Sabbath or switching on a light on the Sabbath. So the point is that you can find good bits of the Bible but you have to cherry-pick, you have reject the nasty bits and pick the nice bits.
Richard Dawkins
Race does not come into it. It is pure religion and culture. Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam. That would have been a fair comparison.
Richard Dawkins
Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. The watchmaker is blind
Richard Dawkins
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.
Richard Dawkins
We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance.
Richard Dawkins