Scientific truth is too beautiful to be sacrificed for the sake of light entertainment or money. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.
—Richard Dawkins
It is possible to enjoy the Mozart concerto without being able to play the clarinet. In fact, you can learn to be an expert connoisseur of music without being able to play a note on any instrument. Of course, music would come to a halt if nobody ever learned to play it. But if everybody grew up thinking that music was synonymous with playing it, think how relatively impoverished many lives would be. Couldn’t we learn to think of science in the same way?
—Richard Dawkins
Topics: Science
Religions are not imaginative, not poetic, not soulful. On the contrary, they are parochial, small-minded, niggardly with the human imagination, precisely where science is generous.
—Richard Dawkins
Topics: Religion
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
Topics: Evolution
We should take astrology seriously. No, I don’t mean we should believe in it. I am talking about fighting it seriously instead of humouring it as a piece of harmless fun
—Richard Dawkins
It’s been suggested that if the supernaturalists really had the powers they claim, they’d win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?
—Richard Dawkins
Topics: Magic
By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
—Richard Dawkins
Topics: Open-mindedness
Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous—indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.
—Richard Dawkins
Reductionism is a dirty word, and a kind of ‘holistier than thou’ self-righteousness has become fashionable.
—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 control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
—Richard Dawkins
Topics: Atheism
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
—Richard Dawkins
Topics: Faith
My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a ‘they’ as opposed to a ‘we’ can be identified at all.
—Richard Dawkins
Topics: Religion
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
Topics: Meditation
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
—Richard Dawkins
Topics: Religion
The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior. However, as we shall see, there are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals. ‘Special’ and ‘limited’ are important words in the last sentence. Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.
—Richard Dawkins
Topics: Selfishness
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Christopher Hitchens Anglo-American Social Critic
- Salman Rushdie Indian-born British Novelist
- Charles Darwin British Naturalist
- Douglas Adams British Author
- John Fowles English Novelist
- Jeremy Bentham British Philosopher, Economist
- Arthur C. Clarke English Science-fiction Writer
- Freeman Dyson American Physicist, Author
- Bertrand A. Russell British Philosopher, Mathematician
- George Orwell English Novelist, Essayist, Journalist
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