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"One way to express the answer is that it might happen by 'chance'. But 'chance' is just a word expressing ignorance. It means 'determined by some as yet unknown, or unspecified, means'."
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"We now consider as fundamental economic functions of the state, many duties that were left a generation ago to chance."
"No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope."
"If we have a chance of succeeding and bringing stability and democracy to Iraq, it will mean learning from our mistakes, not denying them and not ignoring them."
"I have never done Cult TV before, the convention was good. It gives the fans a chance to meet the celebrities. Connect with the guy that used to be a bunch of coloured dots on your TV screen."
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."
"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?"
"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?"
"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'."
"Problems arise when (especially) theologians use such metaphorical language without realizing that that is what they are doing, and without even realizing that there is a distinction between metaphor and reality " saying something like: 'It is not important whether Jesus really fed the five thousand. What matters is what the idea of the story means to us.' Actually it is important, because millions of devout people do believe the Bible is literally true."
"When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine."
"Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever."
"One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all."
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