Quotes from Richard Dawkins

But perhaps life has a tendency to converge on a pathway, something like a magnetic pull that draws it back despite temporary deviations.

Um dos efeitos verdadeiramente ruins da religião é que ela nos ensina que é uma virtude estar satisfeito em não compreender.

The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.

Atheists don't have to fear a great spy camera in the sky. They only – so the argument goes – have to fear real cameras and real policemen. Maybe you've heard the cynical witticism 'Conscience is knowing that someone is watching'.

Selection has favoured genes that cooperate with others. In the fierce competition for scarce resources, in the relentless struggle to eat other survival machines, and to avoid being eaten, there must have been a premium on central coordination rahter than anarchy within the comunal body.

The Madingley paper56 represented a kind of closure for me, a climax to the first part of my scientific career, beginning in my early twenties and ending in my early thirties. At this point, I took off in an entirely new direction, never to return to those youthful mathematical pastures. That new direction, which was to define the rest of my career, and approximately the second half of my life, opened up with the publication of my first book, The Selfish Gene.

My reverie jumps me into the middle of the period and I conjure the giant, unforgettable figure of Douglas Adams, sadly absent from the feast.

Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent.

I'm kind of grateful to the Anglican tradition for its benign tolerance... I suppose I'm a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green. I have a certain love for it.

The meaningless wordplays of modish francophone savants, splendidly exposed in Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Intellectual Impostures (1998), seem to have no other function than to impress the gullible.

What would be wicked would be to say, 'I will not give this person a job because he belongs to this category of people , and there's some kind of statistical tendency for this category of person to be different from that category ...' Treat them as individuals! Look at the qualifications of this individual, and forget about the group, race, whatever you want to call it, to which he belongs.

Creierul este o mas? de materie de circa 1300g, pe care o puteÈ›i È›ine în mân? È™i care poate concepe un univers de o sut? de miliarde de ani-lumin? în diametru." Marian C. Diamond

Isaac Asimov ofera o ilustrare dramatica: este ca si cum toata materia din univers ar fi un bob de nisip, asezat in mijlocul unei camere goale cu lungimea, inaltimea si latimea de 32 km. Si totusi, in acelasi timp, este ca si cum acel bob unic de nisip a fost pulverizat intr-o mie de milioane de milioane de milioane de fragmente, pentru ca acesta e numarul aproximativ de stele din univers. Acestea sunt unele dintre faptele astronomiei si puteti vedea cat sunt de frumoase.

You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.

Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next.

If your plane is being hijacked by an armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants to go on living, there is room for bargaining.

If you're willing to answer yes to a God outside of nature, then there's nothing inconsistent with God on rare occasions choosing to invade the natural world in a way that appears miraculous.

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

Nothing is wrong with peace and love. It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ's followers seem to disagree.

There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.

I'm quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.

I am not absolutely positive there is no god. Only in the sense that I'm not absolutely positive there is no large china teapot in orbit in the solar system.

Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him.

Don't ask God to cure cancer and world poverty. He's too busy finding you a parking space and fixing the weather for your barbecue.