The Selfish Gene Quotes

#1. The Selfish Gene - he set off decades of debate by declaring: We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.

James Gleick

#2. There is only one all pervading God. It has only one message - Love all, encompass all and transcend the limits of the selfish gene.

Amit Ray

#3. I don't actually think 'The Selfish Gene' is a very good title. I think that's one of my worst titles.

Richard Dawkins

#4. Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene is a classic example of science fiction.

Pope Benedict XVI

#5. No doubt this works well enough for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I can readily see that 'The Selfish Gene' on its own, without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequate impression of its contents.

Richard Dawkins

#6. The gene is the basic unit of selfishness.

Richard Dawkins

#7. Nobody does just one thing. But the real difference between being an entrepreneur and everyone else in the world is the ability to monetize. I am an entrepreneur in the classic mold.

Gene Simmons

#8. It was a kindness that was hard to understand ... and the most selfishness she's ever shown.

Bisco Hatori

#9. Mmhh! I have several ideas, but I don't know where to start.'

'You mean to hear me shout your name?'

'Yes, that's one of the ideas I have in mind.

Debra Strattford

#10. I am the thing that I am painting at the time of painting.

Douglas Lockwood

#11. The sad thing is most people have to check with someone before they do the things that make them happy. We're all passing through; the least we can do is be happy, and the only way to do that is by being selfish.

Gene Simmons

#12. I believe, indeed, that overemphasis on the purely intellectual attitude, often directed solely to the practical and factual, in our education, has led directly to the impairment of ethical values.

Albert Einstein

#13. 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.* 12

Richard Dawkins

#14. I want all the kids to do what I do, to look up to me. I want all the kids to copulate me.

Andre Dawson

#15. I think we all have a selfish gene which rises to the top, sometimes. But then we're also all capable of a sudden magnanimity.

Jim Broadbent

#16. Relatives share a substantial proportion of their genes. Each selfish gene therefore has its loyalties divided between different bodies.

Richard Dawkins

#17. I'll probably never go to prom. I haven't ever been to a high school dance.

Cassie Steele

#18. What you cannot have is a gene that sacrifices itself for the benefit of other genes. What you can have is a gene that makes organisms sacrifice themselves for other organisms under the influence of selfish genes.

Richard Dawkins

#19. Six? Here? he says.
Six, here. Seven, eight, nine, anywhere.

Deb Caletti

#20. when the pod door hissed open.

Dan Brown

#21. It requires a deliberate mental effort to turn biology the right way up again, and remind ourselves that the replicators come first, in importance as well as in history.

Richard Dawkins

#22. It may be that the life I desire for her no longer even exists, yet I know what she does not. That there is nothing to lose.

Cormac McCarthy

#23. Science is a victim of its own reductive metaphors: 'Big Bang,' 'selfish gene' and so on. Richard Dawkins' selfish gene fitted with the Thatcherite politics of the time. It should actually be the 'altruistic gene,' but he'd never have sold as many books with a title like that.

Charles Jencks

#24. Poets are the most difficult creatures to work with.

Suman Pokhrel

#25. Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.

Steven Pinker

#26. I always loved designing, but the context needs to be right, and have a positive perspective.

Hedi Slimane

#27. Some of my father's fellow West Pointers once asked him why I turned out so well, his secret in raising me. And he said, 'I never gave him any advice, and he never asked for any.' We agreed on nothing, but we never quarreled once.

Gore Vidal

#28. Biology without selfishness, is nothing but fiction.

Abhijit Naskar