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Let's get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering.

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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Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
Richard Dawkins
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The present Luddism over genetic engineering may die a natural death as the computer-illiterate generation is superseded.... I fear that, if the green movement's high-amplitude warnings over GMOs turn out to be empty, people will be dangerously disinclined to listen to other and more serious warnings.
Richard Dawkins
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Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it's a time for reflection, a time for memory, a time for regret.
Richard Dawkins
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If we ever talk to aliens, their civilisation will be far more advanced than ours (because of distances involved). They won't be religious!
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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St. Augustine explicitly warns against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of looking ridiculous. If you step back from that one narrow interpretation, what the Bible describes is very consistent with the Big Bang.
Richard Dawkins
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Matthew and Luke handle the problem differently, by deciding that Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem after all. But they get him there by different routes.
Richard Dawkins
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When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.
Richard Dawkins
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We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational.
Richard Dawkins
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Thus the creationist's favourite question What is the use of half an eye? Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye.
Richard Dawkins
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Barring a theoretical resolution, which I think is unlikely, you either have to say there are zillions of parallel universes out there that we can't observe at present or you have to say there was a plan. I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses.
Richard Dawkins
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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.
Richard Dawkins
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Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose
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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Quantum mechanics, that brilliantly successful flagship theory of modern science, is deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Eastern mystics have always been deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Therefore, Eastern mystics must have been talking about quantum theory all along.
Richard Dawkins
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The whole of technology depends on a scientific background, and of course technology can be used for evil purposes. You can't blame science for that.
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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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.
Richard Dawkins
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The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is Enough! Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's divisive and it's dangerous.
Richard Dawkins
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We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.
Richard Dawkins