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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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Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
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More quotes by Richard Dawkins

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If I were God wanting to make a human being, I would do it by a more direct way rather than by evolution. Why deliberately set it up in the one way which makes it look as though you don't exist?
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The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.
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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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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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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The true scientific understanding of the nature of existence is so utterly fascinating how could you not want people to share it? Carl Sagan, I think, said 'when you're in love, you want to tell the world.' And who, on understanding a scientific view of reality, would not, as it were, fall in love and want to tell the world.
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It is time to stop the mealy-mouthed euphemisms: 'Nationalists', 'Loyalists', 'Communities', 'Ethnic Groups', 'Cultures', 'Civilizations'. Religions is the word you need. Religions is the word you are struggling hypocritially to avoid.
Richard Dawkins
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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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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 idea of tiny changes cumulated over many steps is an immensely powerful idea, capable of explaining an enormous range of things that would be otherwise inexplicable.
Richard Dawkins
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A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.
Richard Dawkins
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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.
Richard Dawkins
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I guess there are some rights of parents with what they choose their children to learn, but I'm biased in favor of freeing children to learn and not letting parents be too doctrinaire in indoctrinating their children.
Richard Dawkins
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Leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods express a preference for natural methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.
Richard Dawkins
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Most of the ones [Nobel prizes] that have gone to Muslims have been peace prizes, and the [number of Muslims] who have gotten them for scientific work is exceedingly low. But in Jews, it is exceedingly high.
Richard Dawkins
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All qualified physicists, biologists, cosmologists and geologists agree, on the basis of massive, mutually corroborating evidence, that the earth's age is at least four billion years.
Richard Dawkins
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Superficially it's a problem if homosexuality is genetic - if the difference between people's sexual preferences is genetic - because at least a pure homosexual would be unlikely to reproduce and therefore pass on the genes. So the first question you ask is, is it actually genetic, and the answer is probably to some extent yes.
Richard Dawkins
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Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.
Richard Dawkins
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You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.
Richard Dawkins
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Having a debate with a modern Christian is like punching a sponge.
Richard Dawkins