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If we ever talk to aliens, their civilisation will be far more advanced than ours (because of distances involved). They won't be religious!

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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I'm a sucker for nice religious leaders. I fall for it every time.
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I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem.
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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.
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Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say in public life. It is about saying that religion alone should not confer a privileged say in public life, or greater influence on it. It really is as simple as that.
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St. Augustine wrote that basically it is not possible to understand what was being described in Genesis. It was not intended as a science textbook. It was intended as a description of who God was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with God.
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I think the world's always a better place if people are filled with understanding.
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When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.
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Natural selection is anything but random.
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I think what I'd really like to see would be a mass consciousness-raising movement so that we would all become vegetarian.
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Science tells us what we have reason to believe. Not what we have a duty to believe. Not what experts, in their pontificating wisdom, instruct us to believe... No, science tells us what there is good reason to believe.
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It could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small - at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that's the case.
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...there are no natural borderlines in evolution. The illusion of a borderline is created by the fact that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct.
Richard Dawkins
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Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'.
Richard Dawkins
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Thus the creationist's favourite question What is the use of half an eye? Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye.
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Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.
Richard Dawkins
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I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous ideas.
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I would challenge the statement that my scientific instincts are any less rigorous than [Richard Dawkins]. The difference is that my presumption of the possibility of God and therefore the supernatural is not zero, and yours is.
Richard Dawkins
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People really, really hate their religion being criticized. It's as though you've said they had an ugly face they seem to identify personally with it.
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Evolution has been observed. It's just that it hasn't been observed while it's happening.
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Cheetah genes cooperate with cheetah genes but not with camel genes, and vice versa. This is not because cheetah genes, even in the most poetic sense, see any virtue in the preservation of the cheetah species. They are not working to save the cheetah from extinction like some molecular World Wildlife Fund.
Richard Dawkins