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"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."
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"There were so many different versions of him. It was countless versions of a song, and they were all original, and they were all true, and they were all right. It should have been impossible. Was I supposed to love them all?"

"Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it."

"You know what is the most complicated feature of human nature? It is the term complication itself. We are never satisfied with keeping things simple. We always tend to exaggerate even the simplest phenomenon of this planet."

"As American taxpayers know too well, the tax code is incredibly complex and compliance is all to expensive."

"The nature of reality is such that every sufficiently complex event is statistically impossible, they are all one time events. This is a dynamic of novelty and so anything stable is forced to fluctuate including meaning. When we measure a thing we may not see the dynamics as a consequence of resolution. This is because the holographic information field has a nested hierarchy of scale."

"There is no such complicated situation which people could not make more complicated."

"Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness."

"As the complexity in any system increases, the ability to form a correct understanding decreases exponentially."

"The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple."
Explore more quotes by Richard Dawkins

"Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility."

"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."

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."

"We wanted to be accepted by our fellows, especially the influential natural leaders among us; and the ethos of my peers was " until my last year at Oundle " anti-intellectual. You had to pretend to be working less hard than you actually were. Native ability was respected; hard work was not. It was the same on the sports field. Sportsmen were admired more than scholars in any case. But if you could achieve sporting brilliance without training, so much the better. Why is native ability more admired than hard graft? Shouldn't it be the other way around?"

"If the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we should none of us be here."

"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."

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

"Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution?"

"Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun."

"Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'."
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