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Image of the quote is loading... SaveSave Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it. - Quote by Richard Dawkins

Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by ‘truth’. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it.

Richard Dawkins
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The habit of questioning authority is one of the most valuable gifts that a book, or a teacher, can give a young would-be scientist.
Richard Dawkins
Discretion can be abused, and rulebooks are important safeguards against that. But the balance has shifted too far in the direction of an obsessive reverence for rules.
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We're going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.
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The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened
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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?
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When we look at a solid lump of iron or rock, we are 'really' looking at what is almost entirely empty space. It looks and feels solid and opaque because our sensory systems and brains find it convenient to treat it as solid and opaque. It is convenient for the brain to represent a rock as solid because we can't walk through it. 'Solid' is our way of experiencing things that we can't walk through or fall throug, because of the electromagnetic forces between atoms. 'Opaque' is the experience we have when light bounces off the surface of an object, and none of it goes through.
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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.
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There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways.
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