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Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven.

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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The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.
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If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.
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It doesn't hurt my feeling when I get vilified by fundamentalist religious people. I've actually made comedy out of it. I've made light of that.
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I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content.
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There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity.
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I'm a sucker for nice religious leaders. I fall for it every time.
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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.
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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.
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I am thrilled to be alive at time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.
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Matter flows from place to place, and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing I find the reality thrilling.
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You can never be absolutely certain that anything doesn't exist. But you can show that it's unlikely.
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In the beginning was simplicity.
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Religion has been a powerful weapon in the hands of governments, in the hands of priests, in the hands of kings who have used it as a weapon to keep down the populace. It is a wonderful way of disciplining people and making them do what you want, to tell them that if they don't do what you want they will, for example, go to Hell.
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My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
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Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.
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You can't blame science for being used for evil purposes. What you can do is say, 'This is an exceedingly powerful tool.' And you want to make sure it is used for good purposes, not bad ones. That is a political decision.
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Religious people split into three main groups when faced with science. I shall label them the know-nothings, the know-alls, and the no-contests.
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.
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We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe.
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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.
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