Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins FRS FRSLis 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...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 March 1941
CityNairobi, Kenya
Richard Dawkins quotes about
mistake thinking talking
Sometimes I think it's possible to mistake desire for clarity and talking in a no-nonsense way for aggression.
wonder creation transport
All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation.
biblical literature allusion
You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.
cute humility winning
Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.
followers and-love christ
Nothing is wrong with peace and love. It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ's followers seem to disagree.
life science reality
The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.
reading reality ecosystems
It's a flaw in our argument, for sure. By any reading of evolutionary theory, creationists ought to have died out ages ago. They serve no function in the planet's ecosystem, and no other species has survived so long while in such fundamental disagreement with observable reality. If I wasn't such an ardent believer in secular materialism, I'd wager this is really troubling Darwin in the afterlife.
country names parent
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.
needs strange helping
The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans.
believe school government
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.
hero irony worship
I'm not much given to straight, irony-free hero-worship.
stupid believe years
I once wrote that anybody who believes the world is only 6,000 years old is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.
ideas matter facts
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.
unusual species
We are a very, very unusual species.