Quote

When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.

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
Plant
Fertile
Brain
Cell
May
Vehicle
Meme
Mind
Mechanism
Memes
Way
Host
Propagation
Cells
Virus
Literally
Viruses
Turning
Genetic

More quotes by Richard Dawkins

Image
Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. The watchmaker is blind
Richard Dawkins
Image
If you are in the camp I am, one place where science and faith could touch each other is in the investigation of supposedly miraculous events.
Richard Dawkins
Image
The rule of thumb based into the brain by natural selection would not have been, Be nice to your kin and be nice to potential reciprocators. It would have been, Be nice to everybody, because everybody would have been included.
Richard Dawkins
Image
You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.
Richard Dawkins
Image
The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.
Richard Dawkins
Image
No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth.
Richard Dawkins
Image
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
Image
I do understand people when they say that you destroy the magic of childhood if you encourage too much skeptical questioning.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Many people want to send their children to faith schools because they get good exam results, but they're not foolish enough to believe that it's because of faith that they get good exam results.
Richard Dawkins
Image
I'd like everybody to be secular. I suppose I have to say politically I would like religion to become gentler and nicer and to stop interfering with other people's lives, stop repressing women, stop indoctrinating children, all that sort of thing. But I really, really would like to see religion go away altogether.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science.
Richard Dawkins
Image
I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' or 'Islamic children.'
Richard Dawkins
Image
I don't understand why so many people who are sophisticated in science go on believing in God. I wish I did.
Richard Dawkins
Image
My love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western countries is betraying itself where Islam is concerned.
Richard Dawkins
Image
I think we certainly benefit from social institutions which encourage us towards moral behavior. It's very important to have law. It's very important to have a moral education.
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
Evolution never looks to the future.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Most of the ones [Nobel prizes] that have gone to Muslims have been peace prizes, and the [number of Muslims] who have gotten them for scientific work is exceedingly low. But in Jews, it is exceedingly high.
Richard Dawkins