Richard Dawkins Quotes - Page 10

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• An intelligent couple can read their Darwin and know that the ultimate reason for their sexual urges is procreation. They know that the woman cannot conceive because she is on the pill. Yet they find that their sexual desire is in no way diminished by the knowledge. Sexual desire is sexual desire and its force, in an individual's psychology, is independent of the ultimate Darwinian pressure that drove it. It is a strong urge which exists independently of its ultimate rationale.

  Richard Dawkins

  Strong, Couple, Independent

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.253, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Does religion fill a much needed gap? It is often said that there is a God-shaped gap in the brain which needs to be filled: we have a psychological need for God -- imaginary friend, father, big brother, confessor, confidant -- and the need has to be satisfied whether God really exists or not. But could it be that God clutters up a gap that we'd be better off filling with something else? Science, perhaps? Art? Human friendship? Humanism? Love of this life in the real world, giving no credence to other lives beyond the grave?

  Richard Dawkins

  Art, Brother, Father

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• [Alternative medicine is defined as] that set of practices that cannot be tested, refuse to be tested or consistently fail tests.

  Richard Dawkins

  Medicine, Practice, Alternatives

  Richard Dawkins (2004). “A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love”, p.180, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.

  Richard Dawkins

  Real, World, God Delusion

  "The Enemies of Reason". Documentary, 2007.

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• To describe religions as mind viruses is sometimes interpreted as contemptuous or even hostile. It is both. I am often asked why I am so hostile to organized religion.

  Richard Dawkins

  Mind, Atheism, Viruses

  Richard Dawkins (2004). “A Devil's Chaplain”, p.117, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

  Richard Dawkins

  Selfish, Vanity, Goal

  Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.58, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Science is the disinterested search for the objective truth about the material world.

  Richard Dawkins

  Objective Truth, World, Materials

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• You don't believe that the Earth is round only if you're an astronaut. You don't believe Napoleon existed only if you're a historian. You believe these things because they're facts, proved by evidence.

  Richard Dawkins

  Believe, Earth, Facts

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• [If] there is mercy in nature, it is accidental. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.

  Richard Dawkins

  Kind, Mercy, Indifferent

  Richard Dawkins (2004). “A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love”, p.9, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• If you're an atheist, you know, you believe, this is the only life you're going to get. It's a precious life. It's a beautiful life. Its something we should live to the full, to the end of our days. Where if you're religious and you believe in another life somehow, that means you don't live this life to the full because you think you're going to get another one. That's an awfully negative way to live a life. Being a atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily and fully

  Richard Dawkins

  Beautiful, Religious, Atheist

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• You cannot be both sane and well educated and disbelieve in evolution. The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person has got to believe in evolution.

  Richard Dawkins

  Strong, Believe, Religion

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• For centuries the most powerful argument for God's existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But [Charles] Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection.

  Richard Dawkins

  Beautiful, Powerful, Intelligent

  Source: inters.org

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• Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking after himself.

  Richard Dawkins

  Needs, Might, Helping

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.244, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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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

  Religious, Book, People

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• Some physicists solve that problem of the necessity of finely tuned physical constants ... by invoking the anthropic principle, saying, well, here we are, we exist, we have to be in the kind of universe capable of giving rise to us. That in itself is, I think, unsatisfying, and as John Lennox rightly says, some physicists solve that by the multiverse idea-the idea that our universe is just one of many universes.

  Richard Dawkins

  Thinking, Ideas, Giving

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• We're going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.

  Richard Dawkins

  Lucky, Sahara, Evolution

  Unweaving the Rainbow ch. 1 (1998)

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• I am not absolutely positive there is no god. Only in the sense that I'm not absolutely positive there is no large china teapot in orbit in the solar system.

  Richard Dawkins

  Orbit, China, Teapots

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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

  Cute, Humility, Winning

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• Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives.

  Richard Dawkins

  Dna, Archives, Rivals

  Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.124, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution?

  Richard Dawkins

  Atheist, Powerful, Islands

  Richard Dawkins (2009). “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution”, p.270, Simon and Schuster

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• There are very interesting controversies within evolution; however, whether evolution occurs is not one of them. It definitely does.

  Richard Dawkins

  Interesting, Doe, Evolution

  "The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy" with John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley, www.lightspeedmagazine.com. December 2011.

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• What has 'theology' ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has 'theology' ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? What makes you think that 'theology' is a subject at all?

  Richard Dawkins

  Thinking, Make You Think, Religion

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• If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it's not supernatural.

  Richard Dawkins

  Eye, Feelings, Looks

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• Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. Mindless may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from. It came from religion.

  Richard Dawkins

  New York, People, Leader

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• The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

  Richard Dawkins

  Years, Justice, Mad

  Richard Dawkins, Yan Wong (2005). “The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution”, p.613, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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