Richard Dawkins Quotes

• By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

  Richard Dawkins

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Drop, Brain

• 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

  Topics in Respect

  Tags in Fairies, Garden, Bottom

• Isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?

  Richard Dawkins

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in World, Part, Spring, Born

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

  Richard Dawkins

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Generosity, Born

• 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

  Topics in Justice, Life

  Tags in Literally, Attempt, Universe

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

  Richard Dawkins

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Expedient, Rational, Faith

• Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

  Richard Dawkins

  Topics in Nature

  Tags in Improbable, Things, Explain

• Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.

  Richard Dawkins

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Sun, Earth, Today

• For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.

  Richard Dawkins

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Each, Time

• What has ‘theology’ ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has ‘theology’ ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? What makes you think that ‘theology’ is a subject at all?

  Richard Dawkins

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Subject, Think

• One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.

  Richard Dawkins

  Topics in Religion

  Tags in Things

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

  Richard Dawkins

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Essence, Scale

• Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where’s the harm? September 11th changed all that.

  Richard Dawkins

  Topics in Religion

  Tags in Change, Changed, People

• God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.

  Richard Dawkins

  Topics in Environment, God, Power

  Tags in Culture

Richard Dawkins (94)

Birth:	26th March, 1941
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Author, Ethologist, Professor, Writer

About

Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.

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Births

• 1924 - Paul Desmond
• 1957 - Robert L. Ehrlich
• 1896 - Virgil Thomson
• 1870 - Maurice Denis
• 1938 - Shelagh Delaney

Deaths

• 2002 - Karel Reisz
• 1973 - Laurence Harvey
• 1998 - Nelson Goodman
• 1974 - U Thant
• 1970 - Yukio Mishima