Guess quote

Richard Dawkins [1941-0] English

Rank: 4
Scientist, Ethologist

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.

Religion, Faith, Science, Design, Poetry, Technology, Chance, Change, Christmas, Communication, Computers, Courage, Education, Future, Great, Imagination, Intelligence, Power, Space, Truth, Alone, Car, Experience, Funny, History, Knowledge, Marriage, Peace, Positive, Respect, Romantic, Sad, Sports, Travel, War, Wedding, Wisdom

Quote	Tags	Rank
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.	Religion	101
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.	Religion	102
Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.	Car, Design	103
A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence.		104
I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' or 'Islamic children.'		105
Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.		106
Don't kid yourself that you're going to live again after you're dead; you're not. Make the most of the one life you've got. Live it to the full.		107
Christopher Hitchens was a great warrior, a magnificent orator, a pugilist and a gentleman. He was kind, but he took no prisoners when arguing with idiots.	Great	108
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?	Sad	109
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.	Faith, Great	110
By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.	Funny	111
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.		112
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.	Religion	113
We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.	Space, Technology	114
I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will.		115
Segregation has no place in the education system.	Education	116
We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.		117
The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.		118
If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it.	Change	119
Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit.		120
Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.	Faith, Religion	121
Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.		122
The very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible. Not only should we not get our moral compass from religion, as a matter of fact we don't.	Religion	123
Why are we so obsessed with monogamous fidelity?		124
My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans.		125
There are many very educated people who are religious, but they're not creationists.		126
My thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings are all in my brain. My brain is going to rot.		201
An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version.	Change	202
Many people want to send their children to faith schools because they get good exam results, but they're not foolish enough to believe that it's because of faith that they get good exam results.	Faith	203
I do sometimes accuse people of ignorance, but that is not intended to be an insult. I'm ignorant of lots of things. Ignorance is something that can be remedied by education.	Education	204
Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.		205
Islands are natural workshops of evolution.		206
Evil is a miscellaneous collection of nasty things that nasty people do.		207
It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself.	Knowledge, Power, Wisdom	208
Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.	Future	209
Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say in public life. It is about saying that religion alone should not confer a privileged say in public life, or greater influence on it. It really is as simple as that.	Alone, Religion	210
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.		211
It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.	Science	212
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.	Power, Religion, Truth	213
The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.		214
Nothing is wrong with peace and love. It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ's followers seem to disagree.	Peace	215
My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.		216
Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it.		217
I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organised ignorance.	Science	218
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.	Chance	219
The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.	Poetry	220
We've all been brought up with the view that religion has some kind of special privileged status. You're not allowed to criticise it.	Religion	221
When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.		222
Coming out as an atheist can cost an academic his or her job in some parts of America, and many choose to keep quiet about their atheism.		223
I'm sure Obama is an atheist; I'm sure Kennedy was an atheist, but I doubt if Pope Frank is.		224
I detest 'Jingle Bells,' 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,' and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.	Christmas	225
Even if you believe a creator god invented the laws of physics, would you so insult him as to suggest that he might capriciously and arbitrarily violate them in order to walk on water, or turn water into wine as a cheap party trick at a wedding?	Wedding	226
I think my love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western countries is betraying itself where Islam is concerned.	Truth	301
In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of 'The Selfish Gene,' I did actually use the metaphor of a 'virus.' So when anybody talks about something going viral on the Internet, that is exactly what a meme is, and it looks as though the word has been appropriated for a subset of that.		302
There are quite a lot of YouTube clips of me that have gone viral. One that I think of is of a young woman at a lecture I was giving - she came from Liberty University, which is a ludicrous religious institution. She said, 'What if you are wrong?' and I answered that rather briefly, and that's gone viral.		303
Anybody who has something sensible or worthwhile to say should be able to say it calmly and soberly, relying on the words themselves to convey his meaning, without resorting to yelling.		304
Saddam Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran/Iraq war, of the invasion of Kuwait, and of the subsequent era of sanctions culminating in the current invasion.	Future, War	305
Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated social evolution.		306
Don't feel embarrassed if you've never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name, either.		307
We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.		308
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.	Design	309
I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.	Christmas	310
If you were to actually travel around schools and universities and listen in on lectures about evolution, you might find a fairly substantial fraction of young people, without knowing what it is they disapprove of, think they disapprove of it, because they've been brought up to.	Travel	311
You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.		312
There are people who try to get atheists to form a sort of atheist church and have atheist community singsongs and things. I don't see the need for that, but if people want to do it, why shouldn't they?		313
A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a jet plane's exhaust. A great improvement on a simple ballistic shell, it still cannot discriminate particular targets. It could not zero in on a designated New York skyscraper if launched from as far away as Boston.		314
Rather than say he's an atheist, a friend of mine says, 'I'm a tooth fairy agnostic,' meaning he can't disprove God but thinks God is about as likely as the tooth fairy.		315
But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.	Experience, History, Science	316
A universe with a creator would be a totally different kind of universe, scientifically speaking, than one without.		317
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.		318
I have begun several projects which were never completed, not necessarily because they failed, but because I got interested in other things.		319
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?	Respect	320
Sometimes I think it's possible to mistake desire for clarity and talking in a no-nonsense way for aggression.		321
I mean I think that when you've got a big brain, when you find yourself planted in a world with a brain big enough to understand quite a lot of what you see around you, but not everything, you naturally fall to thinking about the deep mysteries. Where do we come from? Where does the world come from? Where does the universe come from?		322
If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, authority, revelation or faith, they will automatically work out for themselves that they are atheists.	Faith	323
I live in a post-Christian world in Oxford; it is quite rare to meet somebody who is religious in academic life now, and there is absolutely no tendency for rioting and mayhem, and it is extremely civilised.		324
I have a strong feeling that the subject of evolution is beautiful without the excuse of creationists needing to be bashed.		325
Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing - a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe.	Courage, Science	326
If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible.		401
Science - or the products of science like technology - is just a way of achieving something real, something that happens, something that works.	Science, Technology	402
There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity.		403
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.	Faith	404
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.		405
I don't know what to think about magic and fairy tales.		406
I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine.	Imagination	407
The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling - though not to me.		408
It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.		409
If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it's not supernatural.		410
If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there's something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.	Faith	411
Einstein was adamant in rejecting all ideas of a personal god.		412
For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.		413
The word 'excess' has no meaning for a male.		414
Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.	Chance	415
'What is the purpose of the universe?' is a silly question.		416
I would like to find a way in which people in Saudi Arabia could learn that they can be something other than a Muslim. Some people may not realize this. Of course, there is the problem that you can get in trouble or get stoned.		417
I think the world's always a better place if people are filled with understanding.		418
All the fossils that we have ever found have always been found in the appropriate place in the time sequence. There are no fossils in the wrong place.		419
The very idea of supernatural magic - including miracles - is incoherent, devoid of sensible meaning.		420
A constellation is not an entity at all, not the kind of thing that Uranus, or anything else, can sensibly be said to 'move into.'		421
Even if 'going retrograde' or 'moving into Aquarius' were real phenomena, something that planets actually do, what influence could they possibly have on human events? A planet is so far away that its gravitational pull on a new-born baby would be swamped by the gravitational pull of the doctor's paunch.		422
Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium.	Science, Space, Sports	423
The reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal world and moles live in an underground world and water striders live in a surface tension-dominated flatland, we live in a social world.	Computers	424
Every night of our lives, we dream, and our brain concocts visions which are, at least until we wake up, highly convincing. Most of us have had experiences which are verging on hallucination. It shows the power of the brain to knock up illusions.		425
Do you advocate the Ten Commandments as a guide to the good life? Then I can only presume that you don't know the Ten Commandments.		426
The central dogma of the New Testament is that Jesus died as a scapegoat for the sin of Adam and the sins that all we unborn generations might have been contemplating in the future. Adam's sin is perhaps mitigated by the extenuating circumstance that he didn't exist.		501
I'm fascinated by the idea that genetics is digital. A gene is a long sequence of coded letters, like computer information. Modern biology is becoming very much a branch of information technology.	Technology	502
In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science because it was for the good of the Communist Party.	Science	503
Christopher Hitchens was a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion far wider than anybody I know.		504
Discrimination is not liberal. Arguing against discrimination is not intolerance.		505
Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.	Computers	506
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?		507
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.		508
Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.		509
God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.		510
Natural selection is anything but random.		511
The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.		512
How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'?		513
We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes.		514
It's a difficult business, finding out what's true about the world, the universe.		515
All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation.		516
To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.	Religion	517
You can't imagine how gratifying it is to have a reader come up to you and say, 'You changed my life.'		518
A good theory explains a lot but postulates little.		519
If you think about it, 534 members of the U.S. Congress cannot all be religious. That's just statistical nonsense. Many of them are quite well-educated.		520
How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair defends them on grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a school whose head of science believes the world is less than 10,000 years old.		521
I guess the Democrats have to pretend to be more pious than the Republicans because they are under suspicion of not being.		522
People believe the only alternative to randomness is intelligent design.	Design	523
Publishers like a good buzz, and negative responses sell books just as well as positive ones.	Positive	524
To an honest judge, the alleged marriage between religion and science is a shallow, empty, spin-doctored sham.	Marriage, Religion	525
People like to trace their ancestry.		526
In the World Wars, people were perfectly able to shoot other people just because they belonged to the wrong country, without ever asking what their opinions were. Faith too is like that.	Faith	601
As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.		602
I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true.	Imagination	603
I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when you're being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have to improvise, you can change sentences around, and they're not exactly right.	Communication	604
What Darwinian theory shows us is that all human races are extremely close to each other. None of them is in any sense ancestral to any other; none of them is more primitive than any other. We are all modern races of exactly equal status, evolutionarily speaking.		605
Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose. Accounts of Jesus's resurrection and ascension are about as well-documented as Jack and the Beanstalk.		606
You can legally lie about the real world to your heart's content, but until some human being is materially damaged, nobody will complain.		607
Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It's a sort of crime against childhood.		608
If there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection.		609
There are risks in the sheer brevity of Twitter, and it's actually quite an elegant art reducing what you have to say to 140 characters, and it's something that I quite enjoy attempting to do.		610
We have a huge amount of DNA in common with jellyfish.		611
The earliest books in the New Testament to be written were the Epistles, not the Gospels. It's almost as though Saint Paul and others who wrote the Epistles weren't that interested in whether Jesus was real.		612
There is something cheap about magic that works just because it is magic.		613
We frequently look into the future of mankind and see dangers. We see if we carry on doing what we are doing in 20 years' time there will be no rainforests left, just to use one example. Looking into the future may be one of the reasons that brains evolved in the first place.		614
A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.		615
Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.		616
I once wrote that anybody who believes the world is only 6,000 years old is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.		617
I love words.		618
I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research.		619
Of course in science there are things that are open to doubt and things need to be discussed. But among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know.		620
We are a very, very unusual species.		621
It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have.		622
Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.		623
I don't feel depressed. I feel elated.		624
It's an important point to realize that the genetic programming of our lives is not fully deterministic. It is statistical - it is in any animal merely statistical - not deterministic.		625
The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.		626
If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle.		701
I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.		702
At least the fundamentalists haven't tried to dilute their message. Their faith is exposed for what it is for all to see.		703
Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.		704
Evolution never looks to the future.		705
Something pretty mysterious had to give rise to the origin of the universe.		706
People say I'm shrill and strident.		707
I think there is a sort of box-ticking mentality. Not just in the teaching profession. You hear about it in medicine and nursing. It's a lawyer-driven insistence on meeting prescribed standards rather than just being a good doctor.		708
I certainly would absolutely never do what some of my American colleagues do and object to religious symbols being used, putting crosses up in the public square and things like that. I don't fret about that at all; I'm quite happy about that.		709
I did not end up as broadly educated as my Cambridge colleagues, but I graduated probably better equipped to write a book on my chosen subject.		710
When the ancestors of the cheetah first began pursuing the ancestors of the gazelle, neither of them could run as fast as they can today.		711
It is immoral to brand children with religion. 'This is a Catholic child.' 'That is a Muslim child.' I want everyone to flinch when they hear such a phrase, just as they would if they heard, 'That is a Marxist child.'		712
What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them.		713
Why did humans lose their body hair? Why did they start walking on their hind legs? Why did they develop big brains? I think that the answer to all three questions is sexual selection.		714
The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it - language, art, science - seemed to have evolved only once. The eye, by contrast, independently evolved 40 times. So, if you were to 'replay' evolution, the eye would almost certainly appear again, whereas the big brain probably wouldn't.		715
I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.		716
As a liberal, I would hesitate to propose a blanket ban on any style of dress because of the implications for individual liberty and freedom of choice.		717
I wouldn't want to have the thought police going to people's homes, dictating what they teach their children. I don't want to be Big Brotherish. I would hate that.		718
There's clearly a lot of Ludditism, and you see it in all the hysteria about every scientific story.		719
Of course you can use the products of science to do bad things, but you can use them to do good things, too.		720
Religious organisations have an automatic tax-free charitable status.		721
Bishops sit in the House of Lords automatically.		722
Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: It gives them something to do.		723
I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.		724
The world is well supplied with spiders whose male ancestors died after mating. The world is bereft of spiders whose would-be ancestors never mated in the first place.		725
I'm not a good observer. I'm not proud of it.		726
If I say that I am more interested in preventing the slaughter of large whales than I am in improving housing conditions for people, I am likely to shock some of my friends.		801
The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories.	Courage	802
We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.		803
Just as I wouldn't expect a gynecologist to have a debate with somebody who believes in the Stork-theory of reproduction, I won't do debates with Young Earth creationists.		804
I think that people in the Bible Belt are far less monolithically religious than many people imagine. There are lots and lots of people who are free-thinking, secularists, or atheists in the so-called Bible Belt.		805
A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.		806
You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.		807
From a Darwinian perspective, it is clear what pain is doing. It's a warning: 'Don't do that again.' If you burn yourself, you're never going to pick up a live coal again.		808
I've never been the sort of firebrand that I've been made out to be. I'm actually quite a mild person.		809
I don't think that it's up to government to dictate what people should wear.		810
Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang, but interposing an outside intelligence does nothing to add to that knowledge, as we still know nothing about the creation of that intelligence.	Intelligence	811
There is no refutation of Darwinian evolution in existence. If a refutation ever were to come about, it would come from a scientist, and not an idiot.		812
I am baffled by the way sophisticated theologians who know Adam and Eve never existed still keep talking about it.		813
Although many of us fear death, I think there is something illogical about it.		814
Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam.		815
A good scientific theory is one which is falsifiable, which has not been falsified.		816
The supernatural is ubiquitous in children's entertainment, from Grimm and Hans Andersen to Disney and 'Harry Potter.'		817
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.	Poetry	818
Any teaching of falsehoods in science classes should certainly be identified and stopped by school inspectors. School inspectors should be looking at science teachings to make sure they are evidence-based science.		819
The Bible was written by fallible human beings.		820
The child has no way of knowing what's good information.		821
Tortoises can survive for weeks without food or water, easily long enough to float in the Humboldt Current from South America to the Galapagos Islands.		822
The obvious objections to the execution of Saddam Hussein are valid and well aired. His death will provoke violent strife between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and between Iraqis in general and the American occupation forces.		823
God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs.		824
If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.		825
Words are not trivial. They matter because they raise consciousness.		826
When a company seeks a new chief executive officer, or a university a new vice-chancellor, enormous trouble is taken to find the best person.		901
Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle.		902
Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.		903
When brains get sufficiently big, presumably, as human brains have, consciousness seems to emerge.		904
There's branches of science which I don't understand; for example, physics. It could be said, I suppose, that I have faith that physicists understand it better than I do.		905
I can remember at the age of about six being fascinated by the planets and learning all about Mars and Venus and things.		906
Nico Tinbergen was my doctoral supervisor, and he was a benign, avuncular sort of influence; everybody loved him.		907
I don't actually think 'The Selfish Gene' is a very good title. I think that's one of my worst titles.		908
Teachers who help to open young minds perform a duty which is as near sacred as I will admit.		909
Beauty arises out of human inspiration.		910
What's wrong with being elitist if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive?		911
I think it's misleading to use a word like 'God' in the way Einstein did. I'm sorry that Einstein did. I think he was asking for trouble, and he certainly was misunderstood.		912
I like to think 'The God Delusion' is a humorous book. I think, actually, it's full of laughs. And people who describe it as a polarizing book or as an aggressive book, it's just that very often they haven't read it.		913
Public sharing is an important part of science.		914
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.		915
The interesting question would be whether there's a Darwinian process, a kind of selection process whereby some memes are more likely to spread than others, because people like them, because they're popular, because they're catchy or whatever it might be.		916
What's going to happen when I die? I may be buried, or I may be cremated, I may give my body to science. I haven't decided yet.		917
We are a unique ape. We have language. Other animals have systems of communication that fall far short of that. They don't have the same ability to communicate complicated conditionals and what-ifs and talk about things that are not present.	Communication	918
I can handle heckling on evolution because it's my own field.		919
I'm not much given to straight, irony-free hero-worship.		920
Genome sequencing has changed taxonomy.		921
We have to find our own purposes in life, which are not derived directly from our scientific history.		922
Placebos work.		923
I do understand people when they say that you destroy the magic of childhood if you encourage too much skeptical questioning.		924
I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there's a scientific lesson, for example - when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That's actually very valuable.		925
I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition.		926
It doesn't hurt my feeling when I get vilified by fundamentalist religious people. I've actually made comedy out of it. I've made light of that.		1001
I don't do formal debates, because formal debates where you have two people up on a stage in equal status, and each of them is given 20 minutes to give their point of view, and then 10 minutes for a rebuttal, or whatever, that creates the illusion that you really do have here two equal points of view of equal scientific standing.		1002
It is a lamentable observation that because of the way our laws are skewed toward the plaintiff, London has become the libel capital of the world.		1003
It is possible in medicine, even when you intend to do good, to do harm instead. That is why science thrives on actively encouraging criticism rather than stifling it.		1004
What is illiberal is not persuasion but imposition of one's views.		1005
If saying that religion should be a private matter and should not have special influence in public life is illiberal, then 74% of U.K. Christians are illiberal, too.		1006
I love romantic poetry.	Poetry, Romantic	1007
I was confirmed at my prep school at the age of 13.		1008
At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes.		1009
When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.		1010
I'm a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims.		1011
My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.		1012
I didn't have a very starry school career, I was medium to above average, nothing special.		1013
Science coverage could be improved by the recognition that science is timeless, and therefore science stories should not need to be pegged to an item in the news.		1014
I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist.		1015
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.		1016
I want very much to communicate science to as wide an audience as possible, but not at a cost of dumbing down, and not at a cost in getting things right.		1017
I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.		1018
I think I would abolish schools which systematically inculcate sectarian beliefs.		1019
There's a mystical strain in every country, and eclipses are likely to bring that out.		1020
We have the power to turn against our creators.		1021
The whole idea of creating saints, it's pure 'Monty Python.' They have to clock up two miracles.		1022
I get the feeling more and more that religion is being left behind.		1023
Notoriously, the United States is the most religious of the Western advanced nations. It's a bit mysterious why that is.		1024
In Britain, Christianity is dying. Islam, unfortunately, isn't.		1025
People really, really hate their religion being criticized. It's as though you've said they had an ugly face; they seem to identify personally with it.		1026
I did a film that's on YouTube of me reading hate mail with a woman playing the cello in the background.		1101
Selfish genes actually explain altruistic individuals, and to me that's crystal-clear.		1102
I'm afraid the Internet is filled with people using really very intemperate language.		1103
I've always been very suspicious of the left-right dimension in politics.		1104
If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.		1105
Either Jesus had a father, or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it.		1106
The feminists taught us about consciousness-raising.		1107
A triumph of consciousness-raising has been the homosexual hijacking of the word 'gay.'		1108
The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the U.S. leads the world by miles.		1109
George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden.		1110
In the 1920s and 1930s, scientists from both the political left and right would not have found the idea of designer babies particularly dangerous - though, of course, they would not have used that phrase.		1111
Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it.		1112
There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists.		1113
The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe.		1114
The state of Israel seems to owe its very existence to the American Jewish vote, while at the same time consigning the non-religious to political oblivion.		1115
To put it bluntly, American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.		1116
I think a fundamentalist is somebody who believes something unshakably and isn't going to change their mind.		1117
Humans are just a very, very small part of the panoply of life, and it is arguable that in a certain sense, humans have emancipated themselves from Darwinian selection.		1118
I was never much bothered about moral questions like, 'How could there be a good God when there's so much evil in the world?'		1119
Humans have a proven track record in taking over planes by the use of threats, which work because the legitimate pilots value their own lives and those of their passengers.		1120
Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it's a time for reflection, a time for memory, a time for regret.		1121
If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.		1122
In Britain, you don't usually learn about evolution until you are about 15. I should have thought that you should start at about 8. But I could be wrong about that.		1123
I would like people to appreciate science in the same way they appreciate the arts.		1124
The usefulness of science is sometimes exaggerated. You'd never talk about music being useful or art being useful.		1125
I sympathize with politicians who have to watch every syllable they utter for fear it will be misused by somebody with an agenda.		1126
I'm pretty sure there is some genetic component towards intelligence.	Intelligence	1201
I didn't know children were expected to have literary heroes, but I certainly had one, and I even identified with him at one time: Doctor Dolittle, whom I now half identify with the Charles Darwin of Beagle days.		1202
Compassionate doctors sometimes lie to patients about the severity of their condition, and it is not always wrong to do so.		1203
My decision to be a scientist was a bit of a drift really, more or less by default.		1204
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.		1205
The universe doesn't owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn't owe us a nice warm feeling inside.		1206

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