Richard Dawkins quotes - page 17

I'm a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims. (Richard Dawkins)

Science coverage could be improved by the recognition that science is timeless, and therefore science stories should not need to be pegged to an item in the news.

Richard Dawkins

'What is the purpose of the universe?' is a silly question.

Richard Dawkins

You can't imagine how gratifying it is to have a reader come up to you and say, 'You changed my life.'

Richard Dawkins

I think my love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western countries is betraying itself where Islam is concerned.

Richard Dawkins

There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists.

Richard Dawkins

The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe.

Richard Dawkins

If your plane is being hijacked by an armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants to go on living, there is room for bargaining.

Richard Dawkins

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

Richard Dawkins

The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.

Richard Dawkins

A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence. (Richard Dawkins)

Something pretty mysterious had to give rise to the origin of the universe.

Richard Dawkins

Segregation has no place in the education system.

Richard Dawkins

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

Richard Dawkins

I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will.

Richard Dawkins

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.

Richard Dawkins

Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say in public life. It is about saying that religion alone should not confer a privileged say in public life, or greater influence on it. It really is as simple as that.

Richard Dawkins

If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it.

Richard Dawkins

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

Natural selection is anything but random.

Richard Dawkins

Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense. (Richard Dawkins)

Genes do indirectly control the manufacture of bodies, and the influence is strictly one way: acquired characteristics are not inherited. No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch.

Richard Dawkins

The word 'mundane' has come to mean boring and dull, and it really shouldn't. It should mean the opposite because it comes from the latin 'mundus', meaning the world, and the world is anything but dull; the world is wonderful. There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.

Richard Dawkins

For his purposes (and mine), scientific medicine is defined as the set of practices which submit themselves to the ordeal of being tested. Alternative medicine is defined as that set of practices which cannot be tested, refuse to be tested, or consistently fail tests. 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. Conversely, if a technique devised by the President of the Royal College of Physicians consistently fails in double-blind trials, it will cease to be a part of 'orthodox' medicine. Whether it will then become 'alternative' will depend upon whether it is adopted by a sufficiently ambitious quack (there are always sufficiently gullible patients).

Richard Dawkins

It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself.

Richard Dawkins

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Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins - Image

Photo: Wikimedia commons, CC BY 3.0

Occupation: English Scientist
Born: March 26, 1941
Quotes count: 475
Wikipedia: Richard Dawkins

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