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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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Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born
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bad things, like good things don't happen any more often than they ought to by chance. the universe has no mind, no feelings, and no personality, so it doesn't do things in order to either hurt or please you. bad things happen because things happen.
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The deceitful misquoting of scientists to suit an anti-scientific agenda ranks among the many unchristian habits of fundamentalist authors.
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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.
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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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It is universally accepted that an admission of atheism would be instant political suicide for any (U.S.) presidential candidate.
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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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It is time to stop the mealy-mouthed euphemisms: 'Nationalists', 'Loyalists', 'Communities', 'Ethnic Groups', 'Cultures', 'Civilizations'. Religions is the word you need. Religions is the word you are struggling hypocritially to avoid.
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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?
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Let our tribute to the dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe.
Richard Dawkins
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The distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you'd expect if evolution was a fact. The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction.
Richard Dawkins
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The fact that somebody does good doesn't make their beliefs true.
Richard Dawkins
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I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic.
Richard Dawkins
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When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.
Richard Dawkins
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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
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We don't need fossils - the case for evolution is watertight without them so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution
Richard Dawkins
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Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.
Richard Dawkins
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I am passionate about truth and passionate about clarity, and I don't regard myself as particularly militant or aggressive. I simply wish to discuss what is true and to listen to evidence and put evidence forward to other people and have a sensible, sane, moderated argument.
Richard Dawkins
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A gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness.
Richard Dawkins
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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