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Having a debate with a modern Christian is like punching a sponge.
Richard Dawkins
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Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
Actor
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Biologist
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Ethologist
Evolutionary Biologist
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Kenya's capital
Clinton Richard Dawkins
Clinton Dawkins
C. Richard Dawkins
C. Dawkins
CR Dawkins
R. Dawkins
Sponges
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More quotes by Richard Dawkins
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
If you are religious at all, it is overwhelmingly probable that your religion is that of your parents. If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false (knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan), you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.
Richard Dawkins
Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.
Richard Dawkins
I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.
Richard Dawkins
There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out.
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
It's very important to try to inculcate into children moral rules, such as do as you would be done by.
Richard Dawkins
Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger - even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all - and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes.
Richard Dawkins
Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous.
Richard Dawkins
In Britain you don't usually learn about evolution until you are about 15. I should have thought that you should start at about 8. But I could be wrong about that.
Richard Dawkins
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
Richard Dawkins
We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes - the gibbons and orangutans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans but excludes humans.
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
Organizing atheists is a bit like herding cats They are on the whole too intelligent and independent minded to lend themselves to being herded.
Richard Dawkins
You cannot be both sane and well educated and disbelieve in evolution. The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person has got to believe in evolution.
Richard Dawkins
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
I mean I think that when you've got a big brain, when you find yourself planted in a world with a brain big enough to understand quite a lot of what you see around you, but not everything, you naturally fall to thinking about the deep mysteries. Where do we come from? Where does the world come from? Where does the universe come from?
Richard Dawkins
Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops.
Richard Dawkins
I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden
Richard Dawkins
There is a tendency for people to say evolution is only a theory. That is inappropriate.
Richard Dawkins
