Quotes from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

“Shouldn’t children be taught critical, sceptical thinking from an early age? Shouldn’t we all be taught to doubt, to weigh up plausibility, to demand evidence?”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

“...none of us will have forgotten that lesson. What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them: education in the true sense, very different from today's assessment-mad exam culture.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

“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.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

“My form master in 4B1, Snappy Priestman, was a gentle man, cultivated, kind and civilized except when he (very occasionally) lost his temper. Even then, there was something oddly gentlemanly about the way he did it. In one of his lessons he caught a boy misbehaving. After a lull when nothing happened, he began to give us verbal warning of his escalating internal fury, speaking quite calmly as an objective observer of his own internal state. Oh dear. I can't hold it. I'm going to lose my temper. Get down below your desks. I'm warning you. It's coming. Get down below your desks. As his voice rose in a steady crescendo he was becoming increasingly red in the face, and he finally picked up everything within reach - chalk, inkpots, books, wood-backed blackboard erasers - and hurled them, with the utmost ferocity, towards the miscreant. Next day he was charm itself, apologizing briefly but graciously to the same boy. He was a kind gentleman provoked beyond endurance - as who would not be in his profession? Who would not be in mine, for that matter?”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

“I am fascinated by the evolution of language, and how local versions diverge to become dialects like Cornish English and Geordie and then imperceptibly diverge further to become mutually unintelligible but obviously related languages like German and Dutch. The analogy to genetic evolution is close enough to be illuminating and misleading at the same time. When populations diverge to become species, the time of separation is defined as the moment when they can no longer interbreed. I suggest that two dialects should be deemed to reach the status of separate languages when they have diverged to an analogously critical point: the point where, if a native speaker of one attempts to speak the other it is taken as a compliment rather than as an insult.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

“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?”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

“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.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

“As Mark Twain cuttingly remarked, if you removed all occurrences of the phrase ‘And it came to pass’, the Book of Mormon would be reduced to a pamphlet.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

“Evolutionary psychologists have noted the particular eagerness with which new babies are scanned for resemblances to their paternal, as opposed to maternal relatives – for the obvious reason that it is harder to be confident of paternity than maternity.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

“The purpose of a lecture should not be to impart information. There are books, libraries, nowadays the internet, for that. A lecture should inspire and provoke thought.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

“But, alas, nobody anticipated the United States Department of Homeland Security.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

“As I have put it before, 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 would none of us be here. We all can regard ourselves as exquisitely improbable. But here, in a triumph of hindsight, we are.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

“How can we know whether the course of a life would have been changed by some particular alteration in its early history?”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

“But perhaps life has a tendency to converge on a pathway, something like a magnetic pull that draws it back despite temporary deviations.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

“The Madingley paper56 represented a kind of closure for me, a climax to the first part of my scientific career, beginning in my early twenties and ending in my early thirties. At this point, I took off in an entirely new direction, never to return to those youthful mathematical pastures. That new direction, which was to define the rest of my career, and approximately the second half of my life, opened up with the publication of my first book, The Selfish Gene.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

“I should have been put down at birth.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

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Popular quotes

“A memory: Isola as a toddler, sugarlump teeth, skin still smelling of milk. Hair that curled without use of an iron and sweet dresses that didn’t matter were dirtied. When she was old enough, she demanded the usual suspects at bedtime: The Little Mermaid, Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast.
Even then, Mother’s contempt for non-Pardieu fairytales was obvious.
‘Hmph,’ she snorted derisively, folding up her knees to perch on Isola’s bed. ‘Listen to me, Isola. The original Beauty’s just an encouragement to young women to accept arranged marriages. What it’s really saying to impressionable girls is, “Don’t worry if your new husband is decades older than you, or ugly, or horrid. If you’re sweet and obedient enough, you might just discover he’s a prince in disguise!’’

Mother’s Most Lasting Advice
‘Never be that girl, Isola. Never pick the beast or the wolf on the off-chance he won’t devour you.”
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― A.S. King, quote from Ask the Passengers

“Every good story deserves a happy ending – it’s a basic rule of storytelling. The boy next door certainly shouldn’t die.”
― Cat Clarke, quote from Undone

“How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had stayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on the people who were, of all, the most stubbornly rooted in the silt of the Ganga, in a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song? It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart.”
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