Quotes from book
The God Delusion

The God Delusion
Richard Dawkins

The God Delusion is a 2006 book by English biologist Richard Dawkins, a professorial fellow at New College, Oxford and former holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford.

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“Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

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

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)
Source: Part 1: "The God Delusion"

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“Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

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“If all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism, I would be the first to admit it, and I would immediately change my mind. As things stand, however, all available evidence (and there is a vast amount of it) favours evolution.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

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“[God is] a vindictive bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic racist, an infanticidal, genocidal, phillicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006)
Context: The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. (p. 31 of the hardcover edition and p. 51 of the paperback edition; see also: Dan Barker, God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, foreword by Richard Dawkins, 2016)

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“The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

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“Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

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“What worries me about religion is that it teaches people to be satisfied with not understanding the world they live in.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Heart Of The Matter: God Under The Microscope | BBC (1996)
Variant: [... ] one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.
Source: The God Delusion

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“The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

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“A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

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“Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

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“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 360

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“Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious
defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking
after himself.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

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“Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to
moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written
in it?”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

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“I mean it as a compliment when I say that you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for an answer.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

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“Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

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“The book is true, and if evidence seems to condtradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out not the book.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

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“Though the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth consuming, hostility provoking rituals, the anti-factual, counter-productive fantasies of religion.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

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“The truly adult view […] is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

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“I am thrilled to be alive at time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

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