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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“Insanity does NOT run in my family. It strolls through, takes its time, and gets to know everyone personally. —T-SHIRT”
― Darynda Jones, quote from Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet
“I could not disagree more,” said Ganesh, my father giving me a hidden wink. “If we build toward them they’ll see it as hostile and we’ll be pulled into a confrontation. Now, I agree that we’ve got to expand — these last few days in Bridewell have clearly shown that. Within a few years Bridewell and the towns against the sea will be at maximum capacity, and then what will we do? We have over ten miles between us and Ainsworth, which I think is a good healthy distance. We can’t expand off the cliffs from Lathbury or Turlock, so those are dead ends. Bridewell is stuck in the middle with no place to grow. I think our best option is to start building two-and three-story buildings. Grow up instead of out. We could grow to twice our size if we just abolished the single-level rule.”
― Patrick Carman, quote from The Dark Hills Divide
“speech to him was a task, a battle, words mustered behind his beard and issued one at a time, heavy and square like tanks.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Surfacing
“After industry and frugality, nothing contributes more to the raising of a young man in the world than punctuality and justice in all his dealings;”
― Max Weber, quote from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
“Przez rok cierpiałem na jakąś chorobę mózgową, a zdawało mi się, że jestem zakochany.”
― Bolesław Prus, quote from The Doll
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