Richard Dawkins is an English evolutionary biologist and author who was born in 1941. He is known for his books The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Extended Phenotype (1982). Dawkins is also know for introducing the term “meme”, which is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.
This is a collection of quotes by Richard Dawkins.
Photo by David Shankbone [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
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My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans.
Richard DawkinsMy personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
Richard DawkinsMy thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings are all in my brain. My brain is going to rot.
Richard DawkinsNatural selection is anything but random.
Richard DawkinsNatural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.
Richard DawkinsNature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent.
Richard DawkinsNow I’d better go out and dig the garden, or something.
Richard DawkinsOur species is the only one not allowed to go to the vet to be painlessly put out of our misery.
Richard DawkinsPantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.
Richard DawkinsSource: The God delusion
Public sharing is an important part of science.
Richard DawkinsReligion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.
Richard DawkinsReligion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It's a sort of crime against childhood.
Richard DawkinsScience replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.
Richard DawkinsSlow, gradual, cumulative natural selection is the ultimate explanation for our existence.
Richard DawkinsThe chicken is only an egg's way for making another egg.
Richard DawkinsThe essential point, as I have put it before, is that there are many more ways of being dead than of being alive.
Richard DawkinsThe rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life, while the fox is only running for his dinner.
Richard DawkinsThe science, or it may be an art, of librarianship is an exercise in applied taxonomy.
Richard DawkinsThe solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.
Richard DawkinsThe universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Richard DawkinsThe world is full of things that exist … !
Richard DawkinsTo make one pound of clover honey, bees have to visit about ten million blossoms.
Richard DawkinsSource: Climbing Mount Improbable
We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes.
Richard DawkinsWe are a unique ape. We have language. Other animals have systems of communication that fall far short of that. They don't have the same ability to communicate complicated conditionals and what-ifs and talk about things that are not present.
Richard DawkinsWe are a very, very unusual species.
Richard DawkinsWe are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Richard DawkinsWe cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Richard DawkinsWe should always be open-minded, but the only good reason to believe that something exists is if there is real evidence that it does.
Richard DawkinsWhat is really pernicious is the practice of teaching children that faith itself is a virtue.
Richard DawkinsWhen I am dying, I should like my life to be taken out under a general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.
Richard Dawkins