{"author":"Richard Dawkins","author_id":"Richard+Dawkins","total_quotes":215,"quotes":[{"text":"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.","author":"Richard Dawkins","tags":["atheism","darwinism","evolution","naturalism"],"id":992,"author_id":"Richard+Dawkins"},{"text":"Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use.The mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.","author":"Richard Dawkins","tags":["dictionary","living","reality","science","suffering","tools","words"],"id":1362,"author_id":"Richard+Dawkins"},{"text":"Science - or the products of science like technology - is just a way of achieving something real, something that happens, something that works.","author":"Richard Dawkins","tags":["science","achieving","products "],"id":6371,"author_id":"Richard+Dawkins"},{"text":"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.","author":"Richard Dawkins","tags":["risk","enlightenment","nice "],"id":10420,"author_id":"Richard+Dawkins"},{"text":"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.","author":"Richard Dawkins","tags":["atheism","philosophy"],"id":13870,"author_id":"Richard+Dawkins"},{"text":"A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.","author":"Richard Dawkins","tags":["children","indoctrination","religion"],"id":14513,"author_id":"Richard+Dawkins"},{"text":"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.","author":"Richard Dawkins","tags":["bible","christianity","god","organized-religion","religion","yahweh"],"id":16860,"author_id":"Richard+Dawkins"},{"text":"Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our lives in our own society. If we were to be guided by the evolution principle, then we would be living in a kind of ultra-Thatcherite, Reaganite society.”“Study your Darwinism for two reasons,” he implored, “because it explains why you’re here, and the second reason is, study your Darwinism in order to learn what to avoid in setting up society. What we need is a truly anti-Darwinian society. Anti-Darwinian in the sense that we don’t wish to live in a society where the weakest go to the wall, where the strongest suppress the weak, and even kill the weak. We — I, at least — do not wish to live in that kind of society. I want to live in the sort of society where we take care of the sick, where we take care of the weak, take care of the oppressed, which is a very anti-Darwinian society.","author":"Richard Dawkins","tags":["dawkins","evolution"],"id":18927,"author_id":"Richard+Dawkins"},{"text":"In a designed economy there would be no trees, or certainly no very tall trees: no forests, no canopy. Trees are a waste. Trees are extravagant. Tree trunks are standing monuments to futile competition - futile if we think in terms of a planed economy. But the natural economy is not planned. Individual plants compete with other plants, of the same and other species, and the result is that they grow taller and taller, far taller than any planner would recommend.","author":"Richard Dawkins","tags":["evolution","science","trees"],"id":32182,"author_id":"Richard+Dawkins"},{"text":"The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.","author":"Richard Dawkins","tags":["extremism","religion","religious-extremism"],"id":34589,"author_id":"Richard+Dawkins"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":215,"pages":22,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}