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I don't shout people down. I argue people down, perhaps.

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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Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.
Richard Dawkins
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If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don't know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God.
Richard Dawkins
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In a way, I think religion is to be admired for asking the right questions. I just think it's got the wrong answers.
Richard Dawkins
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I've seen [Lalla Ward] episodes of Doctor Who. They're good, at least partly because the scripts were written by Douglas Adams.
Richard Dawkins
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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.
Richard Dawkins
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It is possible in medicine, even when you intend to do good, to do harm instead. That is why science thrives on actively encouraging criticism rather than stifling it.
Richard Dawkins
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I do understand people when they say that you destroy the magic of childhood if you encourage too much skeptical questioning.
Richard Dawkins
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Evolution may explain some features of the moral law, but it can't explain why it should have any real significance.
Richard Dawkins
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Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction).
Richard Dawkins
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Evolution has been observed. It's just that it hasn't been observed while it's happening.
Richard Dawkins
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All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation.
Richard Dawkins
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Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once.
Richard Dawkins
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We have sexual lust even though we know perfectly well that, because we're using contraception, it is not going to result in the propagation of our genes. That doesn't matter, because the lust was built into our brains at a time when there was no contraception.
Richard Dawkins
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If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there's something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.
Richard Dawkins
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Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.
Richard Dawkins
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The beauty of evolution is that it does provide an explanation of how you can get complexity out of simplicity. It does it by slow, gradual degree. At no point are you postulating the sudden coming into existence of a complicated being.
Richard Dawkins
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Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it.
Richard Dawkins
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Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance.
Richard Dawkins
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It is an absurd law [Section 295A of the Indian penal code] but also extremely dangerous because it gives fanatics, whether they are Hindus, Catholics or Muslims, a licence to be offended. It also allows people who are in dispute with you to make up false accusations of blasphemy.
Richard Dawkins
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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