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As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect.

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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'Take offense at the drop of a hat' is the unwritten eleventh commandment.
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[Richard Leakey is] a robust hero of a man, who actually lives up to the cliché, “a big man in every sense of the word.” Like other big men he is loved by many, feared by some, and not over-preoccupied with the judgments of any.
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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.
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The beauty of evolution is that it does provide an explanation of how you can get complexity out of simplicity. It does it by slow, gradual degree. At no point are you postulating the sudden coming into existence of a complicated being.
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I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when you're being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have to improvise, you can change sentences around, and they're not exactly right.
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Islamic myths are mostly actually plagiarized from the Christian ones, both biblically and in terms of modern creationism. If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.
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Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything.
Richard Dawkins
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My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about.
Richard Dawkins
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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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Evolution has been observed. It's just that it hasn't been observed while it's happening.
Richard Dawkins
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If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.
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Without gradualness...we are back to a miracle.
Richard Dawkins
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Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. The watchmaker is blind
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A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence.
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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Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think.
Richard Dawkins
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There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.
Richard Dawkins
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The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened
Richard Dawkins
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I hope nobody is seriously suggesting that we get our morals from scripture because if we did we'd be stoning people for working on the Sabbath or switching on a light on the Sabbath. So the point is that you can find good bits of the Bible but you have to cherry-pick, you have reject the nasty bits and pick the nice bits.
Richard Dawkins
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There are very interesting controversies within evolution however, whether evolution occurs is not one of them. It definitely does.
Richard Dawkins