Quotes of Richard Dawkins - somelinesforyou

“ Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakeable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time. ”

- Richard Dawkins

“ 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

“ 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

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

- Richard Dawkins

“ I’m not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history. ”

- Richard Dawkins

“ 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

“ 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

“ 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

“ 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

“ Применение противозачаточных средств иногда критикуют как «противоестественное». Да, это так — очень противоестественное. Беда в том, что противоестественно и всеобщее благосостояние. Я думаю, что большинство из нас считает всеобщее благосостояние в высшей степени желательным. Невозможно, однако, добиться противоестественного всеобщего благосостояния, если не пойти при этом также на противоестественную регуляцию рождаемости, так как это приведет к еще большим невзгодам, чем существующие в природе. ”

- Richard Dawkins

“ To succumb to the God Temptation in either of those guises, biological or cosmological, is an act of intellectual capitulation. ”

- Richard Dawkins

“ The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving controlfreak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. ”

- Richard Dawkins

“ 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, applepolishing, 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

“ 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 copout, 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

“ Why would an allpowerful 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

“ 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

“ 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. [...] Somebody else must be responsible for my wellbeing, and somebody else must be to blame if I am hurt. Is it a similar infantilism that really lies behind the 'need' for a God? ”

- Richard Dawkins

“ 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

“ ...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

“ Creationists eagerly seek a gap in presentday knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it. ”

- Richard Dawkins

“ Science is the poetry of reality. ”

- Richard Dawkins

“ 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

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

- Richard Dawkins

“ 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 meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry. ”

- Richard Dawkins

“ Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. Simulation is both safer and faster. The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have cumulated in subjective consciousness. ”

- Richard Dawkins

“ The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving controlfreak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. ”

- Richard Dawkins

“ 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 consciousnessraising 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

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

- Richard Dawkins

“ Faith is the great copout, 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
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