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Richard Dawkins QUOTES

Richard Dawkins QUOTES

1 " We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred? "

― Richard Dawkins , Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

2 " After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings. "

― Richard Dawkins

3 " Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do. "

― Richard Dawkins , The Selfish Gene

4 " We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. "

― Richard Dawkins , The God Delusion

5 " There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. "

― Richard Dawkins , The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

6 " ...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong. "

― Richard Dawkins

7 " Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it. "

― Richard Dawkins , The God Delusion

8 " Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though. "

― Richard Dawkins , The God Delusion

9 " So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies? "

― Richard Dawkins

10 " 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 , The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

11 " We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. "

― Richard Dawkins

12 " There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point. . . . The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed. "

― Richard Dawkins , The God Delusion

13 " When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix. "

― Richard Dawkins

14 " Science is the poetry of reality. "

― Richard Dawkins

15 " Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong. "

― Richard Dawkins , The God Delusion

16 " The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry. "

― Richard Dawkins , The Selfish Gene

17 " A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so. "

― Richard Dawkins , The God Delusion

18 " Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time. "

― Richard Dawkins

19 " Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. "

― Richard Dawkins

20 " To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries "

― Richard Dawkins , The God Delusion