Richard Dawkins Quotes

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Richard Dawkins

Profession : Scientist

Birth : March 26, 1941

What is illiberal is not persuasion but imposition of one's views.

Richard Dawkins

Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.

Richard Dawkins

The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.

Richard Dawkins

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

Richard Dawkins

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.

Richard Dawkins

Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.

Richard Dawkins

A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence.

Richard Dawkins

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

Richard Dawkins

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes.

Richard Dawkins

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

We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Richard Dawkins

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

Richard Dawkins

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

Richard Dawkins

I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.

Richard Dawkins

There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity.

Richard Dawkins

Natural selection is anything but random.

Richard Dawkins

Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.

Richard Dawkins

Segregation has no place in the education system.

Richard Dawkins

Every night of our lives, we dream, and our brain concocts visions which are, at least until we wake up, highly convincing. Most of us have had experiences which are verging on hallucination. It shows the power of the brain to knock up illusions.

Richard Dawkins

Discrimination is not liberal. Arguing against discrimination is not intolerance.

Richard Dawkins