Richard Dawkins Quotes

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Richard Dawkins

Profession : Scientist

Birth : March 26, 1941

Nico Tinbergen was my doctoral supervisor, and he was a benign, avuncular sort of influence; everybody loved him.

Richard Dawkins

Beauty arises out of human inspiration.

Richard Dawkins

I was never much bothered about moral questions like, 'How could there be a good God when there's so much evil in the world?'

Richard Dawkins

I think it's misleading to use a word like 'God' in the way Einstein did. I'm sorry that Einstein did. I think he was asking for trouble, and he certainly was misunderstood.

Richard Dawkins

I like to think 'The God Delusion' is a humorous book. I think, actually, it's full of laughs. And people who describe it as a polarizing book or as an aggressive book, it's just that very often they haven't read it.

Richard Dawkins

As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.

Richard Dawkins

A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a jet plane's exhaust. A great improvement on a simple ballistic shell, it still cannot discriminate particular targets. It could not zero in on a designated New York skyscraper if launched from as far away as Boston.

Richard Dawkins

Humans have a proven track record in taking over planes by the use of threats, which work because the legitimate pilots value their own lives and those of their passengers.

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

The interesting question would be whether there's a Darwinian process, a kind of selection process whereby some memes are more likely to spread than others, because people like them, because they're popular, because they're catchy or whatever it might be.

Richard Dawkins

What's going to happen when I die? I may be buried, or I may be cremated, I may give my body to science. I haven't decided yet.

Richard Dawkins

In Britain, you don't usually learn about evolution until you are about 15. I should have thought that you should start at about 8. But I could be wrong about that.

Richard Dawkins

I'm not much given to straight, irony-free hero-worship.

Richard Dawkins

I would like people to appreciate science in the same way they appreciate the arts.

Richard Dawkins

The usefulness of science is sometimes exaggerated. You'd never talk about music being useful or art being useful.

Richard Dawkins

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

Richard Dawkins

Placebos work.

Richard Dawkins

I do understand people when they say that you destroy the magic of childhood if you encourage too much skeptical questioning.

Richard Dawkins

We frequently look into the future of mankind and see dangers. We see if we carry on doing what we are doing in 20 years' time there will be no rainforests left, just to use one example. Looking into the future may be one of the reasons that brains evolved in the first place.

Richard Dawkins

I sympathize with politicians who have to watch every syllable they utter for fear it will be misused by somebody with an agenda.

Richard Dawkins