Richard Dawkins Quotes

Environment is a sculptor - a painter. If we had been born in Constantinople, then most of us would have said: 'There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.' If our parents had lived on the banks of the Ganges, we would have been worshipers of Siva, longing for the heaven of Nirvana. As a rule, children love their parents, believe what they teach, and take great pride in saying that the religion of mother is good enough for them.

Pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival.

Believing that your parents are always right.

If a train is coming at you, closing your eyes won't save you ... but if you look right at it, you at least have a chance to jump.

I'm a parent. I think we're responsible for the problems that young people have. I believe that. I don't blame them for any of it. I blame us for what we haven't done as mothers and fathers, not sticking together as a unit.

Why would I strike America and invite a retaliatory counterstrike that would put an end to my regime? Keep in mind, the whole point of this - my entire strategy, all our efforts and the hardships we have borne - is to ensure that my regime and I survive. Why would I risk that? I believe in assassination, not suicide.

My dad taught me my faith, and I believe what he taught me. The man never lied to me in his life.

We must believe the things We teach our children

How much 'ego' do you need? Just enough so that you don't step in front of a bus.

Repression is an evolutionary adaptation permitting us to function under the burden of our expanded consciousness. For what we are conscious of could drive us mad.

There is nothing wrong with having competitive instincts. They are survival instincts.

Of fight or fly, This choice is left ye, to resist or die.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

Whatever you love most, you fear you might lose, you know it can change. Why do you look from left to right when you cross the street? Because you don’t want to get run over. But, you still cross the street.

When you go down a dark alley and you feel that tingling across the back of your neck, that's not just a bad feeling, that's a biological gift from God - the Gift of Fear...when you ignore that gift - when you go down the dark alley and say, Y'know, I'm sure it'll be okay - that's when you find real pain.

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.

It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.

There are doubtless all kinds of ways of explaining why people want security, but I do not think we can start with the psychological explanations. Even psychological states like fear or desire for safety are conditioned by social and political forms of intimidation and scare-mongering that intensify those emotions, and even work to persuade people that nothing less than their survival is at stake.

Whenever you see a toad jumping in broad daylight, then know that something is after its life.

My father's wit, and my mother's tongue, assist me!

My parents are my inspiration. Believe it or not, they're my personal coaches. After every game I still call them and get their take on how I played.

We are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.

They want us dead,' said Bond calmly. 'So we have to stay alive.

No living being is held by anything so strongly as by its own needs. Whatever therefore appears a hindrance to these, be it brother, or father, or child, or mistress, or friend, is hated, abhorred, execrated.