But the very fact that Darwinism is true makes it even more important for us to fight against the naturally selfish and exploitative tendencies of nature.We can do it.Probably no other species of animal or plant can. We can do it because our brains (admittedly given to us by natural selection for reasons pf short-term Darwinian gain) are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences.


Richard Dawkins

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

Humans are terrible at predicting the future. We really overestimate what we can do in the short ter...
BILL MARIS
I believe we can see the future because some part of us responds to the fact that past, present, and...
BRIAN L. WEISS, M.D.
Our minds can work for us or against us at any given moment. We can learn to accept and live with th...
RICHARD CARLSON
In my opinion, terrorism is a question which is not a short- term problem for all of us. It is a lon...
ALEKSANDER KWASNIEWSKI
We don't see that the Taliban ultimately can succeed, and it's a combination both of what th...
JOHN R. ALLEN
That natural selection can produce changes within a type is disputed by no one, not even the staunch...
ROBERT J. SAWYER
Success is a Journey: so, don’t forget to pack your COURAGE: to face the obstacles heading your wa...
PHILIP T. M.
Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pai...
GEORGE WILL
Do the thing and you will have the power.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
You have what others don't have. This is good news which means you can do what others can't do! You ...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR
The challenge is that this drop in satisfaction can have longer-term consequences because it impacts...
LEE PAVACH
Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal. And it is doubly important to re...
YUVAL NOAH HARARI
I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ...
KELLY JONES
The bird dares to break the shell, then the shell breaks open and the bird can fly openly. This is t...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR
Tomorrow is promised to no one. Prioritize today accordingly.
GINA GREENLEE
We can do things the cheap way, the simple way, for the short-term and without regard for the future...
MIKE ROUNDS
In the aftermath of September 11, it has been made clear to us that our foreign policy can no longer...
SAM BROWNBACK
The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living ERNST W. MAYR Clearly, we understand that we've got an enemy that's in for the long term, al-Qaida and the associa...
JOHN ABIZAID
There is naturally a tension between short-term and long-term, ... The key is, you can never sacrifi...
CHARLES PRINCE
The fact remains that most of us are anesthetized to the true cost and true value of long term care ...
MICHAEL BURGESS
But we can also ask for something we are much more likely to get, and that is to find a person or tw...
LEMONY SNICKET
The index is now giving us considerable comfort that economic growth by late 2005 and into 2006 can ...
BILL EVANS
Be all that you can be.
You can be great.
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA
If we start to think about trust as a public good (like clean air and water), we see that we can all...
DAN ARIELY
I have come here to see for myself what is happening and to discuss with the president and the prime...
KOFI ANNAN
It is true that you can say that death is natural, but it is also natural to fight death. But if you...
PETER THIEL
We can do genetics. We can do experiments on fruit flies. We can do experiments on yeast. It's n...
CRAIG VENTER
Who are we? Where do we come from? Why are we this way and not some other? What does it mean to be h...
DR. CARL SAGAN
He's an unusual politician, and he's certainly proving it here today by putting the city's long-term...
DIANA FORTUNA
It is true that all of us are the beneficiaries of crimes committed by our ancestors, and it is true...
DAMON KNIGHT
Normal statistics are like photographs. They can tell us only that X percentage have a problem. They...
BRUCE HEADEY
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our...
RICHARD DAWKINS
It's short-term pain for long-term gain.
CHARLES PEABODY
We have to preserve it and use it sustainably. And the short-term use of resources at the destructio...
BRUCE BABBITT
Providing great schooling is the single most important thing we can do to help any child from a disa...
GEORGE OSBORNE
Self-discipline is often disguised as short-term pain, which often leads to long-term gains. The mis...
CHARLES F. GLASSMAN
We are certainly pleased overall. We can deal with the short-term losses. Over the long term, things...
DICK LUEDKE
We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the w...
SIGMUND FREUD
To me, short-sellers are no good for long-term investors. They can move prices of a stock in a way t...
BOB MILLEN
Soft focus is an important skill that can effect us metaphorically. In other words, the way we see t...
PETER KLINE
Short term we are very concerned about fuel diversity for such reasons as fuel prices and energy sec...
CURTIS MAGLEBY
It's always important for a coach to decide on the short term and long term - one factor doesn&#...
OTTMAR HITZFELD
The numbers show that the government is opening the faucets when it should save money or spend more ...
ALBERTO RAMOS
There is something very wonderful about music. Words are wonderful enough; but music is even more wo...
CHARLES KINGSLEY
If owning stocks is a long-term project for you, following their changes constantly is a very, very ...
DANIEL KAHNEMAN
If it's what you do and you can do it, then you do it.
VAN MORRISON
If you think you can do it, you can.
JOHN BURROUGHS
It ain't bragging if you can do it.
DIZZY DEAN
If you can dream it, you can do it.
ENZO FERRARI
Name the fears that are holding you back. It's the equivalent of flooding the boogeyman with light.
GINA GREENLEE
The most human thing we have to do in life is is to learn to speak our honest convictions and feelin...
LEO F. BUSCAGLIA
Each day I will accomplish one thing on my to do list.
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA
Everything known and referred to as “impossible” is often what has not been attempted before. It...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR
Managers can use power, money or certain circumstances to achieve short-term results. However, motiv...
ERALDO BANOVAC
Significantly, romantic friendships can coexist with the fact of partners' marrying because their re...
BELL HOOKS
Humans like to think of themselves as unusual. We've got big brains that make it possible for us...
MARK PAGEL
We are careful not to touch the NGO people, though, because we can see that even though they are giv...
NOVIOLET BULAWAYO
The very fact we use the term "cold-blooded" as a synonym for "heartless" should tell you something ...
BECKY CHAMBERS
If therefore you shall be remembered for what you did with what you had more than what you had, use ...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH
The short-term economic consequences might not be pretty. But long-term, it might make sense.
JAMES ACKOR
It's ours now and we can improve it and we can just make more long-term plans for the center.
DEBRA SILVA
If you have a lesion in the hippocampus in both sides, you have short term memory, but you can conve...
ERIC KANDEL
Wall Street can be very short-term oriented, and there's a lot of pressure to perform in the short t...
ED HATCH
You have to have a long-term outlook on both. But we're optimistic that we can get both of them done...
ZYGI WILF
Most people see this as a long-term challenge. The short-term money is needed because we have some s...
DR. DAVID NABARRO
If we can do it in football, we can do it in other areas of life. It makes me very optimistic about ...
CORNELIO CALEY
Learn, relearn and outlearn.
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA
Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I saw that animals were important. I saw that plants were even more important. I was also to learn t...
ELIZABETH MARSHALL THOMAS
Be willing to pass through a short term pain so that you can come out with a long term gain. Don't f...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR
Most of us think we're too busy or too important to rest for a day.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
And so, it is not our own life that we live, but the lives of the dead, and the soul that dwells wit...
OSCAR WILDE
The company is taking the actions required for long-term profitability but whenever a company has to...
KARTIK MEHTA
It’s easy to forgive people who have never done anything to make us angry. People who do make us a...
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON
It's a tough budget with tough choices. We do believe the best way to insure the long-term success o...
BRENDAN GILFILLAN
For too long, the world has been focused on short-term growth and development at the expense of our ...
GISELE BUNDCHEN
The best thing you can do for your kids is to show them God working in you on a daily basis.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
That's the best thing that classic can do, is it can return to us from our own past to give us l...
BARTLETT SHER
Through this program, we get an opportunity to see for ourselves if this particular instrument makes...
PETE HARPOLIS
You can be all that you want to be.
Keep dreaming and reach out to your dreams.
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA
Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do...
VERNOR VINGE
Science is really important for the long-term future of the country, I think it's important for the ...
GEORGE ELLIS
We really need to do something in the short term while you folks figure something out for the long t...
DAN BLANKENSHIP
Man can only be certain about the present moment. But is that quite true either? Can he really know ...
MILAN KUNDERA
While the order is not exactly the way we had presented it to the commission, we feel like we can wo...
CHECKY HERRINGTON
I believe compassion to be one of the few things we can practice that will bring immediate and long-...
DALAI LAMA XIV
The fact that it comes at a particularly inopportune moment is unfortunate, but either we are seriou...
JOHN LOGSDON
The fact that the association is statistically significant despite the crudeness of our estimates su...
DANIEL FUNK
I am not disappointed by the small premium; when we bought GDF, it was more for the long-term story ...
MAKIS AGOROS
What 'Short Term 12' did was it gave me the confidence to explore my intuition more. The hea...
BRIE LARSON
This is a big win for a lot of reasons. But, most importantly it allowed us to win our own tournamen...
DICK WILDT
Some people cheat because they want to, because they can, because it gives them a thrill, or because...
JAMEELA JAMIL
In the long term, certainly anything that the federal government can do to expedite the creation and...
TIM GALLAGHER
The short-term goal is him being in our top-nine forwards. We think he can do that. Once he gets the...
GM SCOTT HOWSON
It is our job, as members of parliament, to legislate with an eye to the long term future, to look o...
MALCOLM TURNBULL
Brethren, let us mind our own business - that is, the calling the Lord has called us to - to do ever...
BRIGHAM YOUNG
Humans are often credited with having real foresight, in distinction to the rest of biology which do...
SUSAN BLACKMORE
In the short term, it would make me happy to go play outside. In the long term, it would make me hap...
BILL WATTERSON

More Richard Dawkins

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no des...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Bishops sit in the House of Lords automatically.
RICHARD DAWKINS
There are risks in the sheer brevity of Twitter, and it's actually quite an elegant art reducing...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Anybody who has something sensible or worthwhile to say should be able to say it calmly and soberly,...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discour...
RICHARD DAWKINS
It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is soc...
RICHARD DAWKINS
How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyo...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The Darwinian theory is in principle capable of explaining life. No other theory that has ever been...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Human...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and p...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. Duri...
RICHARD DAWKINS
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous pl...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like...
RICHARD DAWKINS
It's been suggested that if the supernaturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lo...
RICHARD DAWKINS
It is possible to enjoy the Mozart concerto without being able to play the clarinet. In fact, you ca...
RICHARD DAWKINS
My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Religions are not imaginative, not poetic, not soulful. On the contrary, they are parochial, small-m...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Same religion that saves - Damns You
RICHARD DAWKINS
There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and rewar...
RICHARD DAWKINS
There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove t...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in pri...
RICHARD DAWKINS
...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessari...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakeable truth through the power of institutions a...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Rather than say he's an atheist, a friend of mine says, 'I'm a tooth fairy agnostic,'...
RICHARD DAWKINS
There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't pro...
RICHARD DAWKINS
To an honest judge, the alleged marriage between religion and science is a shallow, empty, spin-doct...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I do sometimes accuse people of ignorance, but that is not intended to be an insult. I'm ignoran...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose. Accounts ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Einstein was adamant in rejecting all ideas of a personal god.
RICHARD DAWKINS
Don't kid yourself that you're going to live again after you're dead; you're not. Ma...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I'm sure Obama is an atheist; I'm sure Kennedy was an atheist, but I doubt if Pope Frank is.
RICHARD DAWKINS
One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers whi...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.
RICHARD DAWKINS
We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Selfish genes actually explain altruistic individuals, and to me that's crystal-clear.
RICHARD DAWKINS
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.
RICHARD DAWKINS
Even if you believe a creator god invented the laws of physics, would you so insult him as to sugges...
RICHARD DAWKINS
My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, b...
RICHARD DAWKINS
A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling - thou...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we tho...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Beauty arises out of human inspiration.
RICHARD DAWKINS
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
RICHARD DAWKINS
Evolution never looks to the future.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.
RICHARD DAWKINS
We have a huge amount of DNA in common with jellyfish.
RICHARD DAWKINS
Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Natural selection is anything but random.
RICHARD DAWKINS
God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the envir...
RICHARD DAWKINS
By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
RICHARD DAWKINS
I'm fascinated by the idea that genetics is digital. A gene is a long sequence of coded letters,...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a p...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I live in a post-Christian world in Oxford; it is quite rare to meet somebody who is religious in ac...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an inno...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say i...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The interesting question would be whether there's a Darwinian process, a kind of selection proce...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I did a film that's on YouTube of me reading hate mail with a woman playing the cello in the bac...
RICHARD DAWKINS
If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of s...
RICHARD DAWKINS
When a company seeks a new chief executive officer, or a university a new vice-chancellor, enormous ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we tho...
RICHARD DAWKINS
If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical li...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Just as I wouldn't expect a gynecologist to have a debate with somebody who believes in the Stor...
RICHARD DAWKINS
There are many very educated people who are religious, but they're not creationists.
RICHARD DAWKINS
Don't feel embarrassed if you've never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks a...
RICHARD DAWKINS
If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
RICHARD DAWKINS
We should take astrology seriously. No, I don't mean we should believe in it. I am talking about...
RICHARD DAWKINS
In the 1920s and 1930s, scientists from both the political left and right would not have found the i...
RICHARD DAWKINS
An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and sprea...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented...
RICHARD DAWKINS
We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes.
RICHARD DAWKINS
We are a unique ape. We have language. Other animals have systems of communication that fall far sho...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Discrimination is not liberal. Arguing against discrimination is not intolerance.
RICHARD DAWKINS
Christopher Hitchens was a great warrior, a magnificent orator, a pugilist and a gentleman. He was k...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I think my love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that ther...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I have a strong feeling that the subject of evolution is beautiful without the excuse of creationist...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follo...
RICHARD DAWKINS
If your plane is being hijacked by an armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I am baffled by the way sophisticated theologians who know Adam and Eve never existed still keep tal...
RICHARD DAWKINS
For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria...
RICHARD DAWKINS
A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barb...
RICHARD DAWKINS
A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a jet plane'...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The world is well supplied with spiders whose male ancestors died after mating. The world is bereft ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it's a time for reflection,...
RICHARD DAWKINS
It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think o...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I detest 'Jingle Bells,' 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,'...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I mean I think that when you've got a big brain, when you find yourself planted in a world with ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingle...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I suppose I'm a cultural Anglican, and I see evensong in a country church through much the same ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
People like to trace their ancestry.
RICHARD DAWKINS
What Darwinian theory shows us is that all human races are extremely close to each other. None of th...
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 ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Humans are just a very, very small part of the panoply of life, and it is arguable that in a certain...
RICHARD DAWKINS
We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.
RICHARD DAWKINS
There is no refutation of Darwinian evolution in existence. If a refutation ever were to come about,...
RICHARD DAWKINS
From a Darwinian perspective, it is clear what pain is doing. It's a warning: 'Don't do ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
We've all been brought up with the view that religion has some kind of special privileged status...
RICHARD DAWKINS
You could give Ar...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests,...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the te...
RICHARD DAWKINS
We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us...
RICHARD DAWKINS
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because th...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Of course in science there are things that are open to doubt and things need to be discussed. But am...
RICHARD DAWKINS
As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival wi...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like &#...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned a...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about...
RICHARD DAWKINS
If you were to actually travel around schools and universities and listen in on lectures about evolu...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The very idea of supernatural magic - including miracles - is incoherent, devoid of sensible meaning...
RICHARD DAWKINS
When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructi...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Let us understand Darwinism so we can walk in the opposite direction when it comes to setting up soc...
RICHARD DAWKINS
They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate ratio...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Nature is not cruel, pitiless, indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.
RICHARD DAWKINS
What has 'theology' ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has 'theology' ever said ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
What's wrong with being elitist if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather t...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that i...
RICHARD DAWKINS
You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Passion for passion, an evangelical Christian and I may be evenly matched. But we are not equally fu...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated soci...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The earliest books in the New Testament to be written were the Epistles, not the Gospels. It's a...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Even if 'going retrograde' or 'moving into Aquarius' were real phenomena, something ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine...
RICHARD DAWKINS
George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden.
RICHARD DAWKINS
Any teaching of falsehoods in science classes should certainly be identified and stopped by school i...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The Bible was written by fallible human beings.
RICHARD DAWKINS
All the fossils that we have ever found have always been found in the appropriate place in the time ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
[Evolution is] a theory in a special philosophical sense of science, but in terms of ordinary laymen...
RICHARD DAWKINS
God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs.
RICHARD DAWKINS
I think that people in the Bible Belt are far less monolithically religious than many people imagine...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I certainly would absolutely never do what some of my American colleagues do and object to religious...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the po...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Many people want to send their children to faith schools because they get good exam results, but the...
RICHARD DAWKINS
A good theory explains a lot but postulates little.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The usefulness of science is sometimes exaggerated. You'd never talk about music being useful or...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in pri...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Cloning may be good and it may be bad. Probably it's a bit of both. The question must not be greeted...
RICHARD DAWKINS
God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the envir...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I think there is a sort of box-ticking mentality. Not just in the teaching profession. You hear abou...
RICHARD DAWKINS
What is illiberal is not persuasion but imposition of one's views.
RICHARD DAWKINS
I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to refle...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.
RICHARD DAWKINS
Saddam Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran/Iraq war, of ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it - language, art, scienc...
RICHARD DAWKINS
If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against y...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The obvious objections to the execution of Saddam Hussein are valid and well aired. His death will p...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I like to think 'The God Delusion' is a humorous book. I think, actually, it's full of l...
RICHARD DAWKINS
There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Although many of us fear death, I think there is something illogical about it.
RICHARD DAWKINS
I sympathize with politicians who have to watch every syllable they utter for fear it will be misuse...
RICHARD DAWKINS
In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of 'The Selfish Gene,' I d...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.
RICHARD DAWKINS
I've never been the sort of firebrand that I've been made out to be. I'm actually quite ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions an...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the h...
RICHARD DAWKINS
It is a lamentable observation that because of the way our laws are skewed toward the plaintiff, Lon...
RICHARD DAWKINS
There are quite a lot of YouTube clips of me that have gone viral. One that I think of is of a young...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations ha...
RICHARD DAWKINS
There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
A triumph of consciousness-raising has been the homosexual hijacking of the word 'gay.'
RICHARD DAWKINS
Every night of our lives, we dream, and our brain concocts visions which are, at least until we wake...
RICHARD DAWKINS
If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing fo...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale
RICHARD DAWKINS
Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought,...
RICHARD DAWKINS
To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect o...
RICHARD DAWKINS
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous pl...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I don't feel depressed. I feel elated.
RICHARD DAWKINS
I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The central dogma of the New Testament is that Jesus died as a scapegoat for the sin of Adam and the...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible. Not only should we not get our ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
I was never much bothered about moral questions like, 'How could there be a good God when there&...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Осьминог ничем не похож на мышь, а оба они сильно отлич�...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Некоторые критики ошибочно считают, что «Эгоистичный �...
RICHARD DAWKINS
We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules kno...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Earlier than about 10,000 years ago, all human populations were hunter gatherers. Soon, probably non...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities th...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Darwin himself said as much: 'If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Darwin singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: 'To suppose that the eye wi...
RICHARD DAWKINS
A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of re...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The whole idea of creating saints, it's pure 'Monty Python.' They have to clock up two m...
RICHARD DAWKINS
It is a strange fact, incidentally, that religious apologists love the anthropic principle. For some...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious
defence? One might have supp...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly depa...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Though the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consumin...
RICHARD DAWKINS
There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children,...
RICHARD DAWKINS
The truly adult view [...] is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose ...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independen...
RICHARD DAWKINS
If you don't understand how something
works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You d...
RICHARD DAWKINS
Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to
moral rectitude have the slightest n...
RICHARD DAWKINS