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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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Biologist
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Kenya's capital
Clinton Richard Dawkins
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More quotes by Richard Dawkins

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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
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You cannot be both sane and well educated and disbelieve in evolution. The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person has got to believe in evolution.
Richard Dawkins
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My decision to be a scientist was a bit of a drift really, more or less by default.
Richard Dawkins
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We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
Richard Dawkins
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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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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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I'd like everybody to be secular. I suppose I have to say politically I would like religion to become gentler and nicer and to stop interfering with other people's lives, stop repressing women, stop indoctrinating children, all that sort of thing. But I really, really would like to see religion go away altogether.
Richard Dawkins
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I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden
Richard Dawkins
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You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.
Richard Dawkins
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If people think God is interesting, the onus is on them to show that there is anything there to talk about. Otherwise they should just shut up about it.
Richard Dawkins
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The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal.
Richard Dawkins
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[It] is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.
Richard Dawkins
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Charles Darwin made arguably the greatest discovery any human has ever made. He was a man of great persistence. He wasn't probably a natural genius, he worked very hard - even though he was an invalid. He was a great family man, a very nice man. I think he was admirable in all sorts of ways.
Richard Dawkins
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Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.
Richard Dawkins
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My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a they as opposed to a we can be identified at all.
Richard Dawkins
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I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.
Richard Dawkins
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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.
Richard Dawkins
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Saddam Hussein's mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars... In a small way his execution represents a wanton and vandalistic destruction of important research data.
Richard Dawkins
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I don't want to sound callous. I mean, even if I have nothing to offer, that doesn't matter, because that still doesn't mean that what anybody else has to offer therefore has to be true.
Richard Dawkins
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My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else.
Richard Dawkins