Quotes from Richard Dawkins

Mark Twain's dismissal of the fear of death is another: 'I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

John Stuart Mill was already able to say: 'The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion.

The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness.

some people, educationally over-endowed with the tools of philosophy, cannot resist poking in their scholarly apparatus where it isn't helpful. I am reminded of P. B. Medawar's remark about the attractions of 'philosophy-fiction' to 'a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought'.

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

Do we really need policing — whether by God or by each other — in order to stop us from behaving in a selfish and criminal manner?

The American biblical scholar Bart Ehrman, in a book whose subtitle is The Story Behind Who Changed the New Testament and Why, unfolds the huge uncertainty befogging the New Testament texts.

It requires a deliberate mental effort to turn biology the right way up again, and remind ourselves that the replicators come first, in importance as well as in history.

Panteizim uyar?lm?? ateizmdir. Deizm suland?r?lm?? teizmdir.

Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.

The purpose of a lecture should not be to impart information. There are books, libraries, nowadays the internet, for that. A lecture should inspire and provoke thought.

The most beautiful thing we can experience,' he said, 'is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

Just as a linguist penetrates the past to Proto-Indo-European, triangulating from modern languages and from already reconstructed dead languages, we can do the same with modern organisms, comparing either their external characteristics or their protein or DNA sequences.

No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch. A body is the genes' way of preserving the genes unaltered.

Nature is a miserly accountant, grudging the pennies, watching the clock, punishing the smallest extravagance.

Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself -? ?and that is what it is when it dies? ?- the body tends to revert to a state of? equilibrium with its environment.

One of the great virtues of science is that scientists know when they don't know the answer to something. They cheerfully admit that they don't know. Cheerfully, because not knowing the answer is an exciting challenge to try to find it.

We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage.

Each one of us is a city of cells, and each cell a town of bacteria. You are a gigantic megalopolis of bacteria.

Faith is powerful enough to immunise people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunises them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.

But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee.

We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism—something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.*

An ESS is stable, not because it is particularly good for the individuals participating in it, but simply because it is immune to treachery from within.

As a child, my wife hated her school and wished she could leave. Years later, when she was in her twenties, she disclosed this unhappy fact to her parents, and her mother was aghast: 'But darling, why didn't you come to us and tell us?' Lalla's reply is my text for today: 'But I didn't know I could.