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The feature of living matter that most demands explanation is that it is almost unimaginably complicated in directions that convey a powerful illusion of deliberate design.

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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The Roman Catholic Church is an institution for whose gains the phrase ill-gotten might have been specially invented. And of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history, the medieval equivalent of the Nigerian Internet scam but far more successful.
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We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance.
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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.
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It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.
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There are sincere believers who interpret Genesis 1 and 2 in a very literal way that is inconsistent, frankly, with our knowledge of the universe's age or of how living organisms are related to each other.
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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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We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so.
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I became a little alarmed at the number of my readers who took the meme more positively as a theory of human culture in its own right - either to criticize it (unfairly, given my original modest intention) or to carry it far beyond the limits of what I then thought justified. This was why I may have seemed to backtrack.
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The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.
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Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives.
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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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The fact that somebody does good doesn't make their beliefs true.
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Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit. Of course you can use the products of science to do bad things, but you can use them to do good things too.
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Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose. Accounts of Jesus's resurrection and ascension are about as well-documented as Jack and the Beanstalk.
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What's wrong with being elitist if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive?
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The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear.
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I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
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The moral law is a reason to think of God as plausible - not just a God who sets the universe in motion but a God who cares about human beings, because we seem uniquely amongst creatures on the planet to have this far-developed sense of morality.
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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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I hate the neologism owned for scored a victory over. I have no intention of owning anyone, and nobody will ever own me.
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