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The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals.

Richard Dawkins

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Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
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Kenya's capital
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More quotes by Richard Dawkins

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Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
Richard Dawkins
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I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' or 'Islamic children.'
Richard Dawkins
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I great difficulty having any respect for a religion that has so little confidence in the truth of its beliefs that it feels reduced to using threats in order to propagate those beliefs.
Richard Dawkins
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In a way, I think religion is to be admired for asking the right questions. I just think it's got the wrong answers.
Richard Dawkins
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I doubt that religion can survive deep understanding. The shallows are its natural habitat. Cranks and fundamentalists are too often victimised as scapegoats for religion in general. It is only quite recently that Christianity reinvented itself in non-fundamentalist guise, and Islam has yet to do so.
Richard Dawkins
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The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence … The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held to us as worthy of imitation.
Richard Dawkins
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There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist, and quite good reasons for believing that they do not exist and never have. It has all been a gigantic waste of time and a waste of life. It would be a joke of cosmic proportions if it weren't so tragic.
Richard Dawkins
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I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody is too polite - or too devout - to notice: religion, and specifically the devaluing effect that religion has on human life.
Richard Dawkins
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If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.
Richard Dawkins
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I'm quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.
Richard Dawkins
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The odd thing about tradition is, the longer it's been going, the more people seem to take it seriously - as though sheer passage of time makes something which to begin with was just made up, turns it into what people believe as a fact.
Richard Dawkins
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Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction).
Richard Dawkins
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Human beings are just gene machines.
Richard Dawkins
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The evidence for evolution is so compelling that the only way to save the creation theory is to assume that God deliberately planted enormous quantities of evidence to make it look as if evolution had happened.
Richard Dawkins
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Do humans have a different moral significance than cows in general?
Richard Dawkins
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Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation.
Richard Dawkins
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Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.
Richard Dawkins
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If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle.
Richard Dawkins
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The thing that defines a species is that all members have the same addressing system for their DNA.
Richard Dawkins
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We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance.
Richard Dawkins