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

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I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody is too polite - or too devout - to notice: religion, and specifically the devaluing effect that religion has on human life.
Richard Dawkins
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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
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I don't feel depressed. I feel elated.
Richard Dawkins
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The gravitational constant, if it were off by one part in a hundred million million, then the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang would not have occurred in the fashion that was necessary for life to occur. When you look at that evidence, it is very difficult to adopt the view that this was just chance.
Richard Dawkins
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The truly adult view [...] is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.
Richard Dawkins
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The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.
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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I personally would consider it to be an honour to be fossilized.
Richard Dawkins
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There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting... But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.
Richard Dawkins
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Don't ask God to cure cancer and world poverty. He's too busy finding you a parking space and fixing the weather for your barbecue.
Richard Dawkins
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Cheetah genes cooperate with cheetah genes but not with camel genes, and vice versa. This is not because cheetah genes, even in the most poetic sense, see any virtue in the preservation of the cheetah species. They are not working to save the cheetah from extinction like some molecular World Wildlife Fund.
Richard Dawkins
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I think there could be a very large number who are creationists by default. Those are the people I want to reach.
Richard Dawkins
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You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.
Richard Dawkins
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Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing - a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe.
Richard Dawkins
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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.
Richard Dawkins
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An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version.
Richard Dawkins
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The odd thing about tradition is, the longer it's been going, the more people seem to take it seriously - as though sheer passage of time makes something which to begin with was just made up, turns it into what people believe as a fact.
Richard Dawkins
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Religious organisations have an automatic tax-free charitable status.
Richard Dawkins
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We're going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.
Richard Dawkins
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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