Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: ‘When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many peo… - Richard Dawkins

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.

When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.

The individual selectionist would admit that groups do indeed die out, and that whether or not a group goes extinct may be influenced by the behaviour of the individuals in that group. He might even admit that if only the individuals in a group had the gift of foresight they could see that in the long run their own best interests lay in restraining their selfish greed, to prevent the destruction of the whole group. How many times must this have been said in recent years to the working people of Britain? But group extinction is a slow process compared with the rapid cut and thrust of individual competition. Even while the group is going slowly and inexorably downhill, selfish individuals prosper in the short term at the expense of altruists. The citizens of Britain may or may not be blessed with foresight, but evolution is blind to the future.

"به قول لوئیس بونوئل، فیلم‌ساز شهیر اسپانیایی، "خدا و میهن تیم شکست‌ناپذیری را تشکیل می‌دهند که همه‌ی رکورد‌های سرکوب و خونریزی را می‌شکند.