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We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA. ... This is exactly what we are for. We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object's sole reason for living.

Richard Dawkins

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Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
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Evolutionary Biologist
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Kenya's capital
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More quotes by Richard Dawkins

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All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation.
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Yesterday's dangerous idea is today's orthodoxy and tomorrow's cliché.
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Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur'an. You don't have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about Nazism.
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If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle.
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If it suits [God] to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation?
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My passion is for scientific truth. I don't much care about good and evil. ... I care about what's true.
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The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling - though not to me.
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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.
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It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself.
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Molecular genetics can show off some surprising relationships like, for example, the close relationship of whales to hippopotamuses, which I think nobody ever guessed until molecular data was looked at. The closest relatives of whales are hippopotamuses, even closer than any other cloven-hoofed animals.
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When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong.
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Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.
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There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism .
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I personally would consider it to be an honour to be fossilized.
Richard Dawkins
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Natural selection is anything but random.
Richard Dawkins
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If it is solely an evolutionary convenience, there is really no such thing as good or evil.
Richard Dawkins
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If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.
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Nobody would seriously describe a tiny child as a Marxist child or an Anarchist child or a Post-modernist child. Yet children are routinely labelled with the religion of their parents. We need to encourage people to think carefully before labelling any child too young to know their own opinions and our adverts will help to do that.
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Saddam Hussein's mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars... In a small way his execution represents a wanton and vandalistic destruction of important research data.
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I've never heard of William Craig. A debate with him might look good on his resume, but it wouldn't look good on mine!
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