Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
Actor
Author
Biologist
Epistemologist
Essayist
Ethologist
Evolutionary Biologist
Geneticist
Science Communicator
Science Writer
Screenwriter
Kenya's capital
Clinton Richard Dawkins
Clinton Dawkins
C. Richard Dawkins
C. Dawkins
CR Dawkins
R. Dawkins
Individual
Individuals
Vendetta
Two
Carry
Psyche
Human
Group
Urge
Humans
Across
Urges
Great
Generations
Sickness
People
Groups
Tendency
Rather
Labels
Sicknesses
Evil
Tendencies
Fasten

More quotes by Richard Dawkins

Image
[Creationists have] lost in the courts of law they've long ago lost in the halls of science and they continue to lose with every new piece of evidence in support of evolution. Taking offense is all they've got left.
Richard Dawkins
Image
People who believe in God conclude there must have been a divine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants to get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable.
Richard Dawkins
Image
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil.
Richard Dawkins
Image
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
Image
Race does not come into it. It is pure religion and culture. Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam. That would have been a fair comparison.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Suppose that there's a gene that makes you gay if you were bottle-fed but that has some completely different effect if you were breast-fed. So in the days before bottles were invented that gene would not have manifested itself as gay behavior, but now that bottles are common it can do so.
Richard Dawkins
Image
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
Image
Not only is science corrosive to religion, but religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur'an. You don't have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about Nazism.
Richard Dawkins
Image
I don't know what to think about magic and fairy tales.
Richard Dawkins
Image
There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?
Richard Dawkins
Image
You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.
Richard Dawkins
Image
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
Image
I think the world's always a better place if people are filled with understanding.
Richard Dawkins
Image
I don't understand why so many people who are sophisticated in science go on believing in God. I wish I did.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger - even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all - and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes.
Richard Dawkins
Image
The truly adult view [...] is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.
Richard Dawkins