“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born….” Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins
Ethologist

Clinton Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. Wikipedia

Born: March 26, 1941 (age 76), Nairobi, Kenya
Thesis: Selective pecking in the domestic chick (1967)
Spouse: Lalla Ward (m. 1992), Marian Dawkins (m. 1967–1984)
Movies and TV shows: The Root of All Evil?, MORE
Quotes
We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

This is from Unweaving the Rainbow which contains my favorite Dawkins quote:

“Fling your arms wide in an expansive gesture to span all of evolution from its origin at your left fingertip to today at your right fingertip. All the way across your midline to well past your right shoulder, life consists of nothing but bacteria. Many-celled, invertebrate life flowers somewhere around your right elbow. The dinosaurs originate in the middle of your right palm, and go extinct around your last finger joint. The whole story of Homo sapiens and our predecessor Homo erectus is contained in the thickness of one nail-clipping. As for recorded history; as for the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Jewish patriarchs, the dynasties of Pharaohs, the legions of Rome, the Christian Fathers, the Laws of the Medes and Persians which never change; as for Troy and the Greeks, Helen and Achilles and Agamemnon dead; as for Napoleon and Hitler, the Beatles and Bill Clinton, they and everyone that knew them are blown away in the dust from one light stroke of a nail-file.”

That’s not what’s implied at all. Context is always important.

“During an ‘immortal dinner’ 28th December 1817 hosted by Haydon and attended by Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, Keats, and Keats’ friend Monkhouse, Keats lightheartedly said Newton ‘has destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours.’

—The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon 1786-1846

The quote in the OP is from Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow a book written entirely to refute Keats’ accusation.

Richard Dawkins – The heart of every living thing
What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a “spark of life.” It is information, words, instructions. If you want a metaphor, don’t think of tires and sparks and breath. Think, instead, of a billion discrete, digital characters carved in tablets of crystal. If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.

Richard Dawkins – Understand what our selfish genes are up to
Richard DawkinsLet us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.

Richard Dawkins – DNA neither cares nor knows
Richard DawkinsThe universe we obey has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference . . .DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.