Richard Dawkins citations (330 citations, Page 4)

Richard Dawkins: 330 citations 2 J'aime

Richard Dawkins citations célèbres

“Le Dieu des déistes est sûrement un progrès par rapport au monstre de la Bible. Malheureusement il n'y a pas beaucoup plus de chances qu'il existe, ou qu'il ait jamais existé. Dans l'une ou l'autre de ses formes, l'hypothèse de Dieu est inutile.”

Richard Dawkins

), 2006

“N'est-ce pas toujours une forme de maltraitance des enfants que de leur accoler des étiquettes de croyance auxquelles ils n'ont pas réfléchi parce qu'ils sont trop jeunes? Pourtant, cette habitude persiste encore à ce jour, et elle n'est pratiquement jamais remise en question. […] Notre société, y compris le secteur non religieux, a admis l'idée grotesque qu'il est bien normal d'endoctriner les tout petits enfants dans la religion de leurs parents et de leur coller des étiquettes religieuse - « enfant catholique », « enfant protestant », « enfant juif », « enfant musulman », etc. - mais pas des étiquettes d'un autre ordre, pourtant comparables : pas d'enfants conservateurs, libéraux, républicains ou démocrates. […] Un enfant n'est pas un enfant chrétien, ce n'est pas un enfant musulman, mais un enfant de parents chrétiens ou un enfant de parents musulmans.”

Richard Dawkins livre Pour en finir avec Dieu

Pour en finir avec Dieu (The God Delusion), 2006

“Aussi longtemps que nous acceptons le principe que la foi religieuse doit être respectée simplement parce que c'est la foi religieuse, il est difficile de refuser ce respect à la foi d'Ousama ben Laden et des auteurs d'attentats suicides. L'alternative, si évidente qu'il est inutile d'en souligner l'urgence, est d'abandonner le principe du respect automatique de la foi religieuse. C'est une raison pour laquelle je fais l'impossible pour mettre les gens en garde contre la foi elle-même, et pas seulement contre la prétendue foi « extrémiste .»”

Richard Dawkins livre Pour en finir avec Dieu

S'ils ne sont pas extrémistes en soi, les enseignements de la religion « modérée » sont une invitation ouverte à l'extrémisme.
Pour en finir avec Dieu (The God Delusion), 2006

“La sélection naturelle construit le cerveau de l'enfant en lui donnant une tendance à croire tout ce que lui disent ses parents et les anciens de la tribu. Cette obéissance en toute confiance est précieuse pour la survie au même titre que le guidage sur la lune pour le papillon de nuit. Mais le revers de l'obéissance en toute confiance est la crédulité aveugle. Son produit dérivé inévitable est la vulnérabilité aux infections par les virus de l'esprit.”

Richard Dawkins

), 2006

“On peut dire que, de toutes les œuvres de fiction, le Dieu de la Bible est le personnage le plus déplaisant : jaloux et fier de l'être, il est impitoyable, injuste et tracassier dans son obsession de tout régenter; adepte du nettoyage ethnique, c'est un revanchard assoiffé de sang; tyran lunatique et malveillant, ce misogyne homophobe, raciste, pestilentiel, mégalomane et sadomasochiste pratique l'infanticide, le génocide et le « filicide .»”

Richard Dawkins livre Pour en finir avec Dieu

Pour en finir avec Dieu (The God Delusion), 2006

“Imaginez, avec John Lennon, un monde sans religion… Pas de bombes suicides, pas de 11 septembre, pas de croisades, pas de chasses aux sorcières, pas de Conspiration des poudres, pas de partition de l'Inde, pas de guerres israélo-palestiniennes, pas de massacres de musulmans serbo-croates, pas de persécutions de juifs, pas de « troubles » en Irlande du Nord, pas de « crimes d'honneur », pas de télévangélistes au brushing avantageux et au costume tape-à-l'œil. Imaginez, pas de Talibans pour dynamiter les statues anciennes, pas de décapitations publiques des blasphémateurs, pas de femmes flagellées pour avoir montré une infime parcelle de peau…”

Richard Dawkins

), 2006

“Le panthéisme est de l'athéisme enjolivé, le déisme est du théisme dilué.”

Richard Dawkins

), 2006

“Nous allons mourir, et cela fait de nous les veinards. La plupart des gens ne mourront jamais parce qu’il ne naîtront jamais. Les personnes potentielles qui auraient pu être là à ma place mais en fait ne verront jamais la lumière du jour sont plus nombreuses que les grains de sable du Sahara. Ces fantômes non nés comprennent certainement des poètes plus grands que Keats, des scientifiques plus grands que Newton. Nous savons cela parce que l’ensemble des personnes possibles permises par notre ADN dépassent si massivement l’ensemble des personnes réelles. En dépit de ces probabilités stupéfiantes c’est vous et moi, dans notre banalité, qui sommes là. Nous les quelques privilégiés qui avons gagné la loterie de la vie contre toutes les probabilités, comment osons-nous nous plaindre de notre inévitable retour à cet état précédent dont la majorité d’entre nous ne s’éveillera jamais?”

Richard Dawkins

en
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
Les Mystères de l'arc-en-ciel (Unweaving the Rainbow), 1998

Richard Dawkins: Citations en anglais

“I don't believe you until you tell me, do you really believe, for example, if they say they are Catholic, "Do you really believe that when a priest blesses a wafer, it turns into the body of Christ? Are you seriously telling me you believe that? Are you seriously saying that wine turns into blood?" Mock them. Ridicule them. In public. Don't fall for the convention that we're all too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion is not off limits. Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated and need to be challenged and, if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt.”

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Richard Dawkins

Reason Rally, National Mall, Washington, DC,

“Once again, modern theologians will protest that the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac should not be taken as literal fact. And, once again, the appropriate response is twofold. First, many many people, even to this day, do take the whole of their scripture to be literal fact, and they have a great deal of political power over the rest of us, especially in the United States and in the Islamic world. Second, if not as literal fact, how should we take the story? As an allegory? Then an allegory for what? Surely morals could one derive from this appalling story? Remember, all I am trying to establish for the moment is that we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from scripture. Or, if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty. But then we must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are religious or not.”

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Richard Dawkins livre Pour en finir avec Dieu

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 275 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007

“With so many mind-bytes 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. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort.”

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Richard Dawkins livre Viruses of the Mind

Viruses of the Mind (1993)

“On the properties of God: "Such a bandwidth! God, who may not have a brain made of neurons, or a CPU made of silicon, but if he has the powers attributed to him he must have something far more elaborately and non-randomly constructed than the largest brain or the largest computer we know."”

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Richard Dawkins livre Pour en finir avec Dieu

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 184

“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."”

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Richard Dawkins livre Viruses of the Mind

Viruses of the Mind (1993)

“More generally (and this applies to Christianity no less than to Islam), what is really pernicious is the practice of teaching children that faith itself is a virtue. Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. Teaching children that unquestioned faith is a virtue primes them - given certain other ingredients that are not hard to come by - to grow up into potentially lethal weapons for future jihads or crusades.”

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Richard Dawkins livre Pour en finir avec Dieu

Source: The God Delusion (2006), pp. 347-348 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007

“Molecular evidence suggests that our common ancestor with chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between five and seven million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards … in your left hand you hold the right hand of your mother. In turn she holds the hand of her mother, your grandmother. Your grandmother holds her mother's hand, and so on … How far do we have to go until we reach our common ancestor with the chimpanzees? It is a surprisingly short way. Allowing one yard per person, we arrive at the ancestor we share with chimpanzees in under 300 miles.”

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Richard Dawkins livre A Devil's Chaplain

"Gaps in the Mind"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

“Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

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Richard Dawkins livre The Blind Watchmaker

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 1 “Explaining the Very Improbable” (p. 6)

“A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right.”

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Richard Dawkins livre Pour en finir avec Dieu

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 178

“There is no general reason to expect evolution to be progressive – even in the weak, value-neutral sense. There will be times when increased size of some organ is favoured and other times when decreased size is favoured. Most of the time, average-sized individuals will be favoured in the population and both extremes will be penalised. During these times the population exhibits evolutionary stasis (i. e., no change) with respect to the factor being measured. If we had a complete fossil record and looked for trends in some particular dimension, such as leg length, we would expect to see periods of no change alternating with fitful continuations or reversals in direction – like a weathervane in changeable, gusty weather.”

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Richard Dawkins

The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)

“Another force driving progressive evolution is the so-called "arms-race." Prey animals evolve faster running speeds because predators do. Consequently predators have to evolve even faster running speeds, and so on, in an escalating spiral. Such arms races probably account for the spectacularly advanced engineering of eyes, ears, brains, bat "radar" and all the other high-tech weaponry that animals display.”

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Richard Dawkins

The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)

“We don’t need fossils – the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution”

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Richard Dawkins livre The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

Source: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009), p. 164

“I'm told theology is outside my field of expertise. But is theology a "field" at all? Is there anything in "theology" to be expert ABOUT?”

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Richard Dawkins

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/324171554491596803 (16 April 2013)
Twitter

“It is normally possible to be much more certain who your children are than who your brothers are. And you can be more certain still who you yourself are!”

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Richard Dawkins livre The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 6. Genesmanship

“You don't have to be a scientist – you don't have to play the Bunsen burner – in order to understand enough science to overtake your imagined need and fill that fancied gap. Science needs to be released from the lab into the culture.”

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Richard Dawkins

The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1996)

“There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism.”

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Richard Dawkins livre The Blind Watchmaker

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 9 “Puncturing Punctuationism” (p. 250)

“Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous.”

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Richard Dawkins

Steve Paulson, "The flying spaghetti monster" http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/10/13/dawkins/index3.html (), Salon.com

“Admittedly, people of a theological bent are often chronically incapable of distinguishing what is true from what they'd like to be true. (p. 135 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)”

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Richard Dawkins livre Pour en finir avec Dieu

The God Delusion (2006)

“If you’re seen to criticise Islam you are often accused of racism, which is absurd.”

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Richard Dawkins

“Some states, e. g. "pregnant", are all-or-none, no intermediates. But sexual abuse has shades of grey, from violent buggery to mild touching.”

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Richard Dawkins

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/282850316377014272
Twitter

“There is more than just grandeur in this view of life, bleak and cold though it can seem from under the security blanket of ignorance. There is deep refreshment to be had from standing up and facing straight into the strong keen wind of understanding: Yeats's 'Winds that blow through the starry ways.”

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Richard Dawkins livre A Devil's Chaplain

Compare: "Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own." Bertrand Russell, What I Believe (1925)
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)