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I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.

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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Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.
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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?
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[Invading Iraq] will unite the entire Arab world against the West.
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If it is solely an evolutionary convenience, there is really no such thing as good or evil.
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The body is a survival machine programmed to propagate the genes that reside inside it.
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Everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god - from Ra to Shiva - in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in.
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The beauty of evolution is that it does provide an explanation of how you can get complexity out of simplicity. It does it by slow, gradual degree. At no point are you postulating the sudden coming into existence of a complicated being.
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I do like Philip Pullman.And that's an exception because Philip Pullman's books allow magic.
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The whole of technology depends on a scientific background, and of course technology can be used for evil purposes. You can't blame science for that.
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It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe
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The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the raising of Lazarus, even the Old Testament miracles, all are freely used for religious propaganda, and they are very effective with an audience of unsophisticates and children
Richard Dawkins
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If it's really true, that the museum at Liberty University has dinosaur fossils which are labelled as being 3000 years old, then that is an educational disgrace. It is debauching the whole idea of a university, and I would strongly encourage any members of Liberty University who may be here to leave and go to a proper university.
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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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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You can never be absolutely certain that anything doesn't exist. But you can show that it's unlikely.
Richard Dawkins
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Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once.
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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My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
Richard Dawkins
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Faith is not the opposite of reason.
Richard Dawkins
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Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards.
Richard Dawkins