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Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different senses.

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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You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.
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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.
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The body is a survival machine programmed to propagate the genes that reside inside it.
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There may be some deep questions about the cosmos that are forever beyond science. The mistake is to think they are therefore not beyond religion too.
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The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.
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We're going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.
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The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, nor an eight-level code as in some telephone systems, but a quaternary code with four symbols. The machine code of the genes is uncannily computerlike.
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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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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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Natural selection is anything but random.
Richard Dawkins
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There is a whole field of inquiry that has come up in the last 30 or 40 years - some call it sociobiology or evolutionary psychology - relating to where we get our moral sense and why we value the idea of altruism, and locating both answers in behavioral adaptations for the preservation of our genes.
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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'Take offense at the drop of a hat' is the unwritten eleventh commandment.
Richard Dawkins
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The fact that somebody does good doesn't make their beliefs true.
Richard Dawkins
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Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. The watchmaker is blind
Richard Dawkins
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The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened
Richard Dawkins
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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.
Richard Dawkins
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I need to learn not to bend over backwards to be nice to faith-heads. Give these people an inch and they take a league. I think, as I did when I wrote The God Delusion, that the Roman Catholic Church is a disgusting institution, the second most evil religion in the world.
Richard Dawkins
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There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism .
Richard Dawkins
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The distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you'd expect if evolution was a fact. The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction.
Richard Dawkins