Richard Dawkins · 304 pages
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“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
Richard Dawkins
Born place: in Nairobi, Kenya
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“First day of your teaching you are to stand at your classroom door and let your students know how happy you are to see them. Stand, I say. Any playwright will tell you that when the actor sits down the play sits down. The best move of all is to establish yourself as a presence and to do it outside in the hallway. Outside, I say. That’s your territory and when you’re out there you’ll be seen as a strong teacher, fearless, ready to face the swarm. That’s what a class is, a swarm. And you’re a warrior teacher. It’s something people don’t think about. Your territory is like your aura, it goes with you everywhere, in the hallways, on the stairs and, assuredly, in the classroom.”
― Frank McCourt, quote from Teacher Man
“Change: How much do you want it? Change: How much do you need it?”
― Asa Don Brown, quote from Waiting to Live
“She baked you cookies!' he repeated as if I'd missed the importance.
'So what?' I turned to get my bag, but Tim blocked my way.
'She wants to have your babies.”
― Brian Katcher, quote from Almost Perfect
“while something would be happening inside. I do not believe in evil absolute. I have recounted that philosophy in specific elsewhere in the Annals, and it affects my every observation throughout my tenure as Annalist. I believe in our side and theirs, with the good and evil decided after the fact, by those who survive. Among men you seldom find the good with one standard and the shadow with another. In our war with the Rebel, eight and nine years ago, we served the side perceived as the shadow. Yet we saw far more wickedness practiced by the adherents of the White Rose than by those of the Lady. The villains of the piece were at least straightforward.”
― Glen Cook, quote from Chronicles of the Black Company
“Recently there came a period when I had little to do. This was novel in a life so crammed with busy years, and I decided to amuse myself by writing a novel that was pure science fiction. In the hard-driven times between 1930 and 1950, I was a professional writer not simply because it was my job, but because I wanted to finance more serious researches. In those days there were few agencies pouring out large grants to independent workers. Despite what you might hear about Roosevelt “relief,” those were depression years. One succeeded or one starved.”
― L. Ron Hubbard, quote from Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
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