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We have to find our own purposes in life, which are not derived directly from our scientific history.

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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I mean I think that when you've got a big brain, when you find yourself planted in a world with a brain big enough to understand quite a lot of what you see around you, but not everything, you naturally fall to thinking about the deep mysteries. Where do we come from? Where does the world come from? Where does the universe come from?
Richard Dawkins
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The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
Richard Dawkins
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If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine.
Richard Dawkins
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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.
Richard Dawkins
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I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.
Richard Dawkins
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If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible.
Richard Dawkins
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We have this one life, let's enjoy it, let's live it to the full and don't get so worked up about don't identify yourself so passionately with this business called religion.
Richard Dawkins
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Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.
Richard Dawkins
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Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born
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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Some people find clarity threatening. They like muddle, confusion, obscurity. So when somebody does no more than speak clearly it sounds threatening.
Richard Dawkins
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If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope to eventually understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.
Richard Dawkins
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It is universally accepted that an admission of atheism would be instant political suicide for any (U.S.) presidential candidate.
Richard Dawkins
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[The Internet] is by far the most important innovation in the media in my lifetime. It's like having a huge encyclopedia permanently available. There's a tremendous amount of rubbish on the world wide web, but retrieval of what you want to so rapid that it doesn't really matter
Richard Dawkins
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Evolution is not a genetically controlled distortion of one adult form into another it is a genetically controlled alteration in a developmental program.
Richard Dawkins
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Commonsense lets us down, because commonsense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large the mundane world of the familiar.
Richard Dawkins
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The Roman Catholic Church is an institution for whose gains the phrase ill-gotten might have been specially invented. And of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history, the medieval equivalent of the Nigerian Internet scam but far more successful.
Richard Dawkins
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We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance.
Richard Dawkins
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I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem.
Richard Dawkins
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Myths are fun, as long as you don't confuse them with the truth.
Richard Dawkins