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You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.

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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You believe that all humanity came from Adam and Eve, and humans have not evolved at all since. So tell me between the two of them, which was black, which was white, and which was Asian?
Richard Dawkins
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The Universe does not owe us meaning.
Richard Dawkins
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The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.
Richard Dawkins
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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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I doubt that religion can survive deep understanding. The shallows are its natural habitat. Cranks and fundamentalists are too often victimised as scapegoats for religion in general. It is only quite recently that Christianity reinvented itself in non-fundamentalist guise, and Islam has yet to do so.
Richard Dawkins
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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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What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up.
Richard Dawkins
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We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Richard Dawkins
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I've always been antagonistic to any naïve application of the selfish gene theory to politics. Some people have attempted to suggest that it means we are selfish or we should be selfish.
Richard Dawkins
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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
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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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The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain.
Richard Dawkins
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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
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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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Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.
Richard Dawkins
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Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.
Richard Dawkins
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Very close cousins like humans and chimps have almost all their genes in common. Slightly less close cousins like humans and monkeys still have recognizably the same genes. You could carry on right on down to humans and bacteria, and you will find continuous compelling evidence for the hierarchical tree of cousinship.
Richard Dawkins
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Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different senses.
Richard Dawkins
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Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?
Richard Dawkins
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The resemblance of the signs of the zodiac to the animals after which they are named... is as unimpressive as the predictions of astrologers.
Richard Dawkins