A Quote by Richard Dawkins

We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

Richard Dawkins

Quote Topics

Against Alone Built Creators Cultured Earth Gene Machines Meme Our Power Rebel Selfish Turn Tyranny

Quote Author

Richard Dawkins
English - Scientist
Born: March 26, 1941

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

Richard Dawkins

We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

Richard Dawkins

All other species on this planet are gene machines only. They don't imitate at all well; we alone are gene machines and meme machines as well.

Susan Blackmore

Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise.

K. Eric Drexler

When ATM machines came out and people were prosecuted for robbing ATM machines, I don't think anybody thought the banks were against technology because they didn't want their ATM machines lifted.

Hilary Rosen

We have the power to turn against our creators.

Richard Dawkins

There is one common struggle against those who have appropriated the earth, the money, and the machines.

Voltairine de Cleyre

An adolescent does not rebel against her parents. She rebels against their power. If parents would rely less on power and more on nonpower methods to influence their children from infancy on, there would be little for children to rebel against when they become adolescents. The use of power to change the behavior of children, then, has this severe limitation: parents inevitably run out of power, and sooner than they think.

Thomas Gordon

The reality of our century is technology: the invention, construction and maintenance of machines. To be a user of machines is to be of the spirit of this century. Machines have replaced the transcendental spiritualism of past eras.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.

Donna J. Haraway

In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of 'The Selfish Gene,' I did actually use the metaphor of a 'virus.' So when anybody talks about something going viral on the Internet, that is exactly what a meme is, and it looks as though the word has been appropriated for a subset of that.

Richard Dawkins

They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

Richard Dawkins

It is true that some have greater power of resistance than others, but everyone has the power to close his heart against doubt, against darkness, against unbelief, against anger, against hatred, against jealousy, against malice, against envy. God has given this power unto all of us, and we can gain still greater power by calling upon Him for that which we lack. If it were not so, how could we be condemned for giving way to wrong influences?

George Q. Cannon

Indeed, everything was a shock at the beginning. The wash machines, dryers, dishwashers, garbage disposal machines, juicers, toasters, and yes, the ATM machines. Watching money spilled out of a wall was simply amazing!