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. View quote
Richard Dawkins
'What is the purpose of the universe?' is a silly question. View quote
Richard Dawkins
You can't imagine how gratifying it is to have a reader come up to you and say, 'You changed my life.' View quote
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. View quote
Richard Dawkins
There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Richard Dawkins
We have to find our own purposes in life, which are not derived directly from our scientific history. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Segregation has no place in the education system. View quote
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. View quote
Richard Dawkins
I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. View quote
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. View quote
Richard Dawkins
If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it. View quote
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. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Natural selection is anything but random. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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). View quote
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. View quote
Richard Dawkins