Richard Dawkins Quotes Page 2

“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.”

“You need more than luck to navigate successfully through a thousand sieves in succession.”

“What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them: education in the true sense, very different from today's assessment-mad exam culture.”

“Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection. Why, I wonder, is it so hard for even sophisticated scientists to grasp this simple point?”

“Natural selection is a non-random force, pushing towards improvement. Every generation has its Darwinian failures but every individual is descended only from previous generations' successful minorities.”

“Failure to disprove something is not a good reason to believe it.”

“DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”

“A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents.”

“A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple.”

“A medieval cathedral could consume a hundred man-centuries in its construction, yet was never used as a dwelling, or for any recognizably useful purpose.”

“A professorship of theology should have no place in our institution.”

“Bush presided over more executions in Texas than any other governor in the state’s history, averaging one death every nine days.”

“Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.”

“Even without physical abduction, isn't it always a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about?”

“If by 'God' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying. It does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”

“If science cannot answer some ultimate question, what makes anybody think that religion can?”

“There are no natural borderlines in evolution. The illusion of a borderline is created by the fact that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct.”

“A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee.”

“A male on the other hand can never get enough copulations with as many different females as possible: the word excess has no meaning for a male.”

“Contraception is sometimes attacked as ‘unnatural’. So it is, very unnatural. The trouble is, so is the welfare state. I think that most of us believe the welfare state is highly desirable. But you cannot have an unnatural welfare state, unless you also have unnatural birth control; otherwise, the end result will be misery even greater than that which obtains in nature.”

“Curiously, peace-time appeals for individuals to make some small sacrifice in the rate at which they increase their standard of living seem to be less effective than war-time appeals for individuals to lay down their lives.”

“Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name.”

“Each individual goes on for an unpredictable time. Unpredictable on any particular occasion, that is, but averaging the true value of the resource.”

“Even in apparently faithful monogamous species, the female may be wedded to a male’s territory rather than to him personally.”

“Even while the group is going slowly and inexorably downhill, selfish individuals prosper in the short term at the expense of altruists.”

“Sex is clearly binary, declaring oneself to be otherwise is a distortion of reality.”