Richard Dawkins Quotes

Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and rewar...

I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.

Of course in science there are things that are open to doubt and things need to be discussed. But am...

All life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct ...

God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the envir...

We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us...

If you were to actually travel around schools and universities and listen in on lectures about evolu...

To an honest judge, the alleged marriage between religion and science is a shallow, empty, spin-doct...

Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say i...

Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our...

Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned a...

The reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal w...

Either blasphemy is a victimless crime or its victim is powerful enough to take care of himself with...

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions an...

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we tho...

I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagi...

...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessari...

Moral philosophers say things like, ‘What is actually wrong with cannibalism?’ There are two ways of...

I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the...

Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought,...

Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance ...

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith...

I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We...

I'm pretty sure there is some genetic component towards intelligence.

I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there's a sci...

If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than an...

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous pl...

When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word...

I love romantic poetry.

The idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe.

The Bible may be an arresting andpoetic work of fiction, but it is not the sort of book you should g...

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove t...

So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable positi...

Nothing is wrong with peace and love. It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ's follow...

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything b...

I detest 'Jingle Bells,' 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,' and the obscene spendi...

If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that ther...

People believe the only alternative to randomness is intelligent design.

Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang, but interposing an outside...

If you're an atheist, you know, you believe, this is the only life you're going to get. It's a preci...

I do sometimes accuse people of ignorance, but that is not intended to be an insult. I'm ignorant of...

We are a unique ape. We have language. Other animals have systems of communication that fall far sho...

Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks a...

I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that i...

Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our...

An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and sprea...

I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine...

Science - or the products of science like technology - is just a way of achieving something real, so...

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that ...

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go ...

I am passionate about the truth. Passion is very different from fundamentalism.

When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a ...

Why would anybody be intimidated by mere words? I mean, neither I nor any other athiest that I know ...

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

Evolution never looks to the future.

The very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible. Not only should we not get our ...

It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a bett...

Religion is a distraction from true education.

I can remember at the age of about six being fascinated by the planets and learning all about Mars a...

Even if you believe a creator god invented the laws of physics, would you so insult him as to sugges...

It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the l...

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests,...

There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which...

Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humani...

Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.

Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning ...

Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

Publishers like a good buzz, and negative responses sell books just as well as positive ones.

It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is soc...

The obvious objections to the execution of Saddam Hussein are valid and well aired. His death will p...

It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is soc...

I'm quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compens...

I don't give a damn for anybody's opinion, I only care about the facts. So I'm not an enthusiast for...

Segregation has no place in the education system.

A biochemist colleague has kindly provided me with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and enough hydroqu...

The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it - language, art, scienc...

Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything,...

How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyo...

Science is the poetry of reality.

The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall ...

I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to refle...

You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature eith...

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no des...

A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology w...

Beauty arises out of human inspiration.

Science is interesting, and if you don't agree you can fuc

The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A ...

All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of cre...

Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a...

We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Fly...

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith...

The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the ...

I'm fascinated by the idea that genetics is digital. A gene is a long sequence of coded letters, lik...

The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the te...

Even those who do not, or cannot, avail themselves of a scientific education, choose to benefit from...

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes.

If the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fai...

We wanted to be accepted by our fellows, especially the influential natural leaders among us; and th...

…the Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle ...