Quotes by Richard Dawkins and others

Here are some of my favourite quotes from this page. What are yours?
reposted from: http://richarddawkins.net/quotes

Richard Dawins Quotes

"Flowers and elephants are 'for' the same thing as everything else in the living kingdoms, for spreading Duplicate Me programs written in DNA language. Flowers are for spreading copies of instructions for making more flowers. Elephants are for spreading copies of instructions for making more elephants."

"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."

"The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry."

"It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that if Darwinism was really a theory of chance, it could not work."

"With so many mindbytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns."

"...it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions."

"Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it."

"The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as 'faith'."

"No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth."

"We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes."

"Hot on the heels of its magnanimous pardoning of Galileo, the Vatican has now moved with even more lightning speed to recognise the truth of Darwinism."

"Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don't know it."

"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."

"The trouble is that God in this sophisticated, physicist's sense bears no resemblance to the God of the Bible or any other religion."

"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."

"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?"