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[It] is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

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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We have sexual lust even though we know perfectly well that, because we're using contraception, it is not going to result in the propagation of our genes. That doesn't matter, because the lust was built into our brains at a time when there was no contraception.
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False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment.
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Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all independently just happening to fit the bill.
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Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different senses.
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How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.
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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.
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I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine.
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A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.
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Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance.
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All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation.
Richard Dawkins
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The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.
Richard Dawkins
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I do like Philip Pullman.And that's an exception because Philip Pullman's books allow magic.
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That was unfortunate. I should have compared religion with religion and compared Islam not with Trinity College but with Jews, because the number of Jews who have won Nobel Prizes is phenomenally high.
Richard Dawkins
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They are in you and me they created us, body and mind and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.
Richard Dawkins
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The river of my title is a river of DNA, a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues
Richard Dawkins
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Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.
Richard Dawkins
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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.
Richard Dawkins
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Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'.
Richard Dawkins
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... you need more than luck to navigate successfully through a thousand sieves in succession.
Richard Dawkins
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By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. -this quote is actually found in Carl Sagan's book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, where he attributes it to engineer James Oberg, who says he stole it from someone else.
Richard Dawkins