Quote #102

I'm not a very good politician, and it doesn't really occur to me to think about what's the best way to achieve something politically. If you look at the historical struggle for women's suffrage, for example...women who militantly campaigned for the right to vote were written off as strident extremists, and people accused them of alienating the very people whose support they should have been courting. But today, the idea of women not being allowed to vote is preposterous. Would you be moderate? Would you be respectful? You wouldn't.

More from Richard Dawkins

  1. We've reached a truly remarkable situation: a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligencia and the American electorate. A philosop…
  2. Thus the creationist's favourite question 'What is the use of half an eye?' Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. H…
  3. Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no wort…
  4. Nilsson and Pelger began with a flat retina atop a flat pigment layer and surmounted by a flat, protective transparent layer. The transpare…
  5. It is often said, mainly by the 'no-contests', that although there is no positive evidence for the existence of God, nor is there evidence …
  6. But even with these conservative assumptions, the time taken to evolve a fish eye from flat skin was minuscule: fewer than 400,000 generati…
  7. Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps be…
  8. We should take astrology seriously. No, I don't mean we should believe in it. I am talking about fighting it seriously instead of humoring …

All Richard Dawkins quotes