top of page
.png){kind=small}
"You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Culture quotes
"There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever."
"Of the big horror movies of the '70s, you have 'The Omen,' 'The Sentinel,' 'Rosemary's Baby,' 'The Stepford Wives,' 'Burnt Offerings' - these are all romantic fatalist movies where there's a sort of glimmer of hope... but darkness wins."
"Without literature, life is hell."
"The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance."
"The gypsies believe the bear to be a brother to man because he has the same body beneath his hide, because he drinks beer, because he enjoys music and because he likes to dance."
"The very fact that a Frenchman was prepared, after tow minutes of conversation, to be so friendly towards anyone, especially one who had come from England, made me restless."
"There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating."
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'."
bottom of page