Richard Dawkins

Natural selection is anything but random.

— Richard Dawkins

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.

— Richard Dawkins

There is more than just grandeur in this view of life, bleak and cold though it can seem from under the security blanket of ignorance. There is deep refreshment to be had from standing up and facing straight into the strong keen wind of understanding: Yeats's 'Winds that blow through the starry ways'.

— Richard Dawkins

Every night of our lives, we dream, and our brain concocts visions which are, at least until we wake up, highly convincing. Most of us have had experiences which are verging on hallucination. It shows the power of the brain to knock up illusions.

— Richard Dawkins

Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: 'Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?' And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: 'What kind of evidence is there for that?' And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.

— Richard Dawkins

People believe the only alternative to randomness is intelligent design.

— Richard Dawkins

I want to examine that dangerous thing that’s common to Judaism and Christianity as well: the process of non-thinking called "faith". (Part 1, 00:00:55)

— Richard Dawkins

When the ancestors of the cheetah first began pursuing the ancestors of the gazelle, neither of them could run as fast as they can today.

— Richard Dawkins

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

— Richard Dawkins

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories.

— Richard Dawkins

One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.

— Richard Dawkins

I like to think 'The God Delusion' is a humorous book. I think, actually, it's full of laughs. And people who describe it as a polarizing book or as an aggressive book, it's just that very often they haven't read it.

— Richard Dawkins

I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.

— Richard Dawkins

If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them? Who's God trying to impress? Presumably himself, since he is judge and jury, as well as execution victim. (Part 2, 00:29:56)

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

Yousef Al-Khattab: When you take the women and dress them like whores, on the street... Yousef Al-Khattab: But you allow it as a norm, to let the women go on the street dressed like this. What's going on with your society?

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

Of course politics are important — Iraq, Palestine, even social deprivation in Bradford. But as we wake up to this huge challenge to our civilised values, don't let's forget the elephant in the room — an elephant called "religion". (Part 1, 00:00:24)

— Richard Dawkins

Why are we so obsessed with monogamous fidelity?

— Richard Dawkins

I want to say that killing for God is not only hideous murder — it is also utterly ridiculous. (Part 1, 00:44:39)

— Richard Dawkins

Rather than say he's an atheist, a friend of mine says, 'I'm a tooth fairy agnostic,' meaning he can't disprove God but thinks God is about as likely as the tooth fairy.

— Richard Dawkins

And when we look closely, we find a system of morals which any civilised person today should surely find poisonous.

— Richard Dawkins

The very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible. Not only should we not get our moral compass from religion, as a matter of fact we don't.

— Richard Dawkins

You've just said a very revealing thing. Are you telling me that the only reason you don't steal and rape and murder is that you're frightened of God? (Part 2, 00:13:55)

— Richard Dawkins

I didn't have a very starry school career, I was medium to above average, nothing special.

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

Beauty arises out of human inspiration.

— Richard Dawkins

Oh, but of course the story of Adam and Eve was only ever symbolic, wasn't it? Symbolic?! So Jesus had himself tortured and executed for a symbolic sin by a non-existent individual? Nobody not brought up in the faith could reach any verdict other than "barking mad". (Part 2, 00:30:25)

— Richard Dawkins

One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.

— Richard Dawkins

I was reminded of a quotation by the famous American physicist Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist. Weinberg said: "Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it, you'd have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion". (Part 2, 00:35:01)

— Richard Dawkins

If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there's something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.

— Richard Dawkins

If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, authority, revelation or faith, they will automatically work out for themselves that they are atheists.

— Richard Dawkins

Thus the creationist's favourite question "What is the use of half an eye?" Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye.

— Richard Dawkins

What has 'theology' ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has 'theology' ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? What makes you think that 'theology' is a subject at all?

— Richard Dawkins

Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism. (p. 40)

— Richard Dawkins

The Bible was written by fallible human beings.

— Richard Dawkins

I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented. (p. 57 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

What expertise can theologians bring to deep cosmological questions that scientists cannot? (p. 79)

— Richard Dawkins

The very idea of supernatural magic - including miracles - is incoherent, devoid of sensible meaning.

— Richard Dawkins

On the Argument from Degree: "That's an argument? You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion." (p. 102)

— Richard Dawkins

Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say in public life. It is about saying that religion alone should not confer a privileged say in public life, or greater influence on it. It really is as simple as that.

— Richard Dawkins

Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang, but interposing an outside intelligence does nothing to add to that knowledge, as we still know nothing about the creation of that intelligence.

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

The fact that something is written down is persuasive to people not used to asking questions like: ‘Who wrote it, and when?’ ‘How did they know what to write?’ ‘Did they, in their time really mean what we, in our time, understand them to be saying?’ ‘Were they unbiased observers, or did they have an agenda that coloured their writing?’. (p. 118 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)

— Richard Dawkins

Don't feel embarrassed if you've never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name, either.

— Richard Dawkins

Admittedly, people of a theological bent are often chronically incapable of distinguishing what is true from what they'd like to be true. (p. 135 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)

— Richard Dawkins

I suppose I'm a cultural Anglican, and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green. I have a certain love for it.

— Richard Dawkins

On the Arguement from Scripture: "Ever since the nineteenth century, scholarly theologians have made an overwhelming case that the gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened in the history of the real world. All were written long after the death of Jesus, and also after the epistles of Paul, which mentioned almost none of the alleged facts of Jesus's life. All were then copied and recopied … by falilible scribes who, in any case, had their own religious agendas." (p. 118)

— Richard Dawkins

Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.

— Richard Dawkins

"But there are many unsophisticated Christians out there … who take the Bible very seriously indeed as a literal and accurate record of history and hence as evidence supporting the religious beliefs. Do these people never open the book that they believe is the literal truth? Why don't they notice the glaring contradictions?" (p. 120)

— Richard Dawkins

There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity.

— Richard Dawkins

I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when you're being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have to improvise, you can change sentences around, and they're not exactly right.

— Richard Dawkins

"The four Gospels that made it into the official canon were chosen, more or less arbitrarily, out of a larger sample of at least a dozen … The gospels that didn't make it were omitted by those ecclesiastics perhaps because they included stories that were even more embarrassingly implausible than those in the four canonical ones." (p. 121)

— Richard Dawkins

I am baffled by the way sophisticated theologians who know Adam and Eve never existed still keep talking about it.

— Richard Dawkins

"It is even possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, historical case that Jesus never lived at all … Although Jesus probably existed, reputable biblical scholars do not in general regard the New Testament (and obviously not the Old Testament) as reliable record of what actually happened in history, and I shall not consider the Bible further evidence for any kind of deity." (p. 122)

— Richard Dawkins

A triumph of consciousness-raising has been the homosexual hijacking of the word 'gay.'

— Richard Dawkins

"However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747" (p. 138)

— Richard Dawkins

I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' or 'Islamic children.'

— Richard Dawkins

On natural selection: "Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance." (p. 146)

— Richard Dawkins

I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.

— Richard Dawkins

[...] one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding. (p. 152 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)

— Richard Dawkins

A good theory explains a lot but postulates little.

— Richard Dawkins

"What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, whereas chance and design both fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so. (p. 153)

— Richard Dawkins

I think that people in the Bible Belt are far less monolithically religious than many people imagine. There are lots and lots of people who are free-thinking, secularists, or atheists in the so-called Bible Belt.

— Richard Dawkins

"A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right." (p. 178)

— Richard Dawkins

We are a unique ape. We have language. Other animals have systems of communication that fall far short of that. They don't have the same ability to communicate complicated conditionals and what-ifs and talk about things that are not present.

— Richard Dawkins

On the properties of God: "Such a bandwidth! God, who may not have a brain made of neurons, or a CPU made of silicon, but if he has the powers attributed to him he must have something far more elaborately and non-randomly constructed than the largest brain or the largest computer we know." (p. 184)

— Richard Dawkins

The reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal world and moles live in an underground world and water striders live in a surface tension-dominated flatland, we live in a social world.

— Richard Dawkins

Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses. (p. 176)

— Richard Dawkins

I'm not a good observer. I'm not proud of it.

— Richard Dawkins

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

— Richard Dawkins

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. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

— Richard Dawkins

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point. (p. 360)

— Richard Dawkins

Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing - a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe.

— Richard Dawkins

The first cause cannot have been an intelligence, let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshiped. Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.

— Richard Dawkins

The state of Israel seems to owe its very existence to the American Jewish vote, while at the same time consigning the non-religious to political oblivion.

— Richard Dawkins

The word 'mundane' has come to mean boring and dull, and it really shouldn't. It should mean the opposite because it comes from the latin 'mundus', meaning the world, and the world is anything but dull; the world is wonderful. There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.

— Richard Dawkins

What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them.

— Richard Dawkins

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.

— Richard Dawkins

Reason has built the modern world. It is a precious but also a fragile thing, which can be corroded by apparently harmless irrationality. We must favor verifiable evidence over private feeling. Otherwise we leave ourselves vulnerable to those who would obscure the truth.

— Richard Dawkins

It is possible in medicine, even when you intend to do good, to do harm instead. That is why science thrives on actively encouraging criticism rather than stifling it.

— Richard Dawkins

We should be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brain falls out.

— Richard Dawkins

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

— Richard Dawkins

...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.

— Richard Dawkins

Science replaces private prejudice with publicly verifiable evidence.

— Richard Dawkins

I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.

— Richard Dawkins

So whereabouts in my body might there be a black hole?

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

— Richard Dawkins

Isn't Deepak Chopra just exploiting Quantum jargon as plausible-sounding hocus pocus?

— Richard Dawkins

Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.

— Richard Dawkins

If any remedy is tested under controlled scientific conditions and proved to be effective, it will cease to be alternative and will simply become medicine. So-called alternative medicine either hasn’t been tested or it has failed its tests.

— Richard Dawkins

God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.

— Richard Dawkins

I detest 'Jingle Bells,' 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,' and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.

— Richard Dawkins

The idea that ancient equal years of accumulated wisdom is a fallacy. [...] In medicine, 'ancient' also means developed before we understood the causes of disease, before germ theory. It was based on ignorance then and age makes it no truer. We misguidedly look back to a golden age that never was; ours is the golden age of safe tested medicine, effective beyond placebo, in which we've cut infant mortality and conquered diseases, then forgotten they existed.

— Richard Dawkins

When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.

— Richard Dawkins

Sceptical rational inquiry is always the best approach. [...] we can think independently, be truly open-minded. That means asking questions, being open to real corroborated evidence. Reason has liberated us form superstition and given us centuries of progress. We abandon it at our peril.

— Richard Dawkins

I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organised ignorance.

— Richard Dawkins

Gravity is not a version of the truth. It is the truth. Anybody who doubts it is invited to jump out of a tenth-floor window.

— Richard Dawkins

I'm a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims.

— Richard Dawkins

We don’t need fossils – the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution

— Richard Dawkins

I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will.

— Richard Dawkins

It is very good that Wikipedia also gives a page to "Internet Meme". Internet memes are arguably the most important subset of memes today

— Richard Dawkins

My decision to be a scientist was a bit of a drift really, more or less by default.

— Richard Dawkins

Some states, e.g. "pregnant", are all-or-none, no intermediates. But sexual abuse has shades of grey, from violent buggery to mild touching.

— Richard Dawkins

My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.

— Richard Dawkins

Haven't read Koran so couldn't quote chapter & verse like I can for Bible. But often say Islam greatest force for evil today

— Richard Dawkins

Discrimination is not liberal. Arguing against discrimination is not intolerance.

— Richard Dawkins

With respect to those meanings of "human" that are relevant to the morality of abortion, any fetus is less human than an adult pig.

— Richard Dawkins

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

— Richard Dawkins

Those people who think sexual abuse is a black-or-white, all-or-none category are incapable of clear, logical thought.

— Richard Dawkins

It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.

— Richard Dawkins

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

I'm told theology is outside my field of expertise. But is theology a "field" at all? Is there anything in "theology" to be expert ABOUT?

— Richard Dawkins

Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle.

— Richard Dawkins

I hate the neologism "owned" for "scored a victory over". I have no intention of owning anyone, and nobody will ever own me.

— Richard Dawkins

In the World Wars, people were perfectly able to shoot other people just because they belonged to the wrong country, without ever asking what their opinions were. Faith too is like that.

— Richard Dawkins

Don't ask God to cure cancer & world poverty. He's too busy finding you a parking space & fixing the weather for your barbecue.

— Richard Dawkins

Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.

— Richard Dawkins

All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

— Richard Dawkins

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

— Richard Dawkins

If we ever talk to aliens, their civilisation will be far more advanced than ours (because of distances involved). They won't be religious!

— Richard Dawkins

Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose. Accounts of Jesus's resurrection and ascension are about as well-documented as Jack and the Beanstalk.

— Richard Dawkins

I’ve seen a dog & bitch indulging in full 69. Males of many species including Drosophila lick female genitals before copulation.

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

Who (apart from the pig) is damaged by bacon?

— Richard Dawkins

Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.

— Richard Dawkins

Suggest always put Islamic "scholar" in quotes, to avoid insulting true scholars. True scholars have read more than one book.

— Richard Dawkins

Bishops sit in the House of Lords automatically.

— Richard Dawkins

Mild paedophilia is bad. Violent paedophilia is worse. If you think that's an endorsement of mild paedophilia, go away and learn how to think. Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse. If you think that's an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.

— Richard Dawkins

How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'?

— Richard Dawkins

Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.

— Richard Dawkins

The child has no way of knowing what's good information.

— Richard Dawkins

Eugenics was not inspired by Darwin's natural selection but by ancient agricultural ARTIFICIAL selection. Eugenics is UNnatural selection.

— Richard Dawkins

I don't think that it's up to government to dictate what people should wear.

— Richard Dawkins

University is about confronting new ideas, unfamiliar, un-"safe". If you want to be "safe" you are not worthy of a university education.

— Richard Dawkins

Islands are natural workshops of evolution.

— Richard Dawkins

Islam needs a feminist revolution. It will be hard. What can we do to help?

— Richard Dawkins

Science is the poetry of reality.

— Richard Dawkins

Evil is a miscellaneous collection of nasty things that nasty people do.

— Richard Dawkins

You know you've won the argument when the only counter argument they can find is that you are white or male or old.

— Richard Dawkins

At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes.

— Richard Dawkins

Don't call him "clock boy" since he never made a clock. Hoax Boy, having hoaxed his way into the White House, now wants $15M in addition!

— Richard Dawkins

I think my love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western countries is betraying itself where Islam is concerned.

— Richard Dawkins

It's an important point to realize that the genetic programming of our lives is not fully deterministic. It is statistical - it is in any animal merely statistical - not deterministic.

— Richard Dawkins

There's branches of science which I don't understand; for example, physics. It could be said, I suppose, that I have faith that physicists understand it better than I do.

— Richard Dawkins

Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit.

— Richard Dawkins

There's a mystical strain in every country, and eclipses are likely to bring that out.

— Richard Dawkins

A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.

— Richard Dawkins

There are many very educated people who are religious, but they're not creationists.

— Richard Dawkins

It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.

— Richard Dawkins

I do sometimes accuse people of ignorance, but that is not intended to be an insult. I'm ignorant of lots of things. Ignorance is something that can be remedied by education.

— Richard Dawkins

Selfish genes actually explain altruistic individuals, and to me that's crystal-clear.

— Richard Dawkins

I once wrote that anybody who believes the world is only 6,000 years old is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.

— Richard Dawkins

Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.

— Richard Dawkins

The interesting question would be whether there's a Darwinian process, a kind of selection process whereby some memes are more likely to spread than others, because people like them, because they're popular, because they're catchy or whatever it might be.

— Richard Dawkins

Just as I wouldn't expect a gynecologist to have a debate with somebody who believes in the Stork-theory of reproduction, I won't do debates with Young Earth creationists.

— Richard Dawkins

I think there is a sort of box-ticking mentality. Not just in the teaching profession. You hear about it in medicine and nursing. It's a lawyer-driven insistence on meeting prescribed standards rather than just being a good doctor.

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

When brains get sufficiently big, presumably, as human brains have, consciousness seems to emerge.

— Richard Dawkins

The supernatural is ubiquitous in children's entertainment, from Grimm and Hans Andersen to Disney and 'Harry Potter.'

— Richard Dawkins

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

— Richard Dawkins

The feminists taught us about consciousness-raising.

— Richard Dawkins

I have a strong feeling that the subject of evolution is beautiful without the excuse of creationists needing to be bashed.

— Richard Dawkins

Christopher Hitchens was a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion far wider than anybody I know.

— Richard Dawkins

Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it's a time for reflection, a time for memory, a time for regret.

— Richard Dawkins

A good scientific theory is one which is falsifiable, which has not been falsified.

— Richard Dawkins

I'm quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.

— Richard Dawkins

Evolution never looks to the future.

— Richard Dawkins

Segregation has no place in the education system.

— Richard Dawkins

It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have.

— Richard Dawkins

In the World Wars, people were perfectly able to shoot other people just because they belonged to the wrong country, without ever asking what their opinions were. Faith too is like that.

— Richard Dawkins

Sometimes I think it's possible to mistake desire for clarity and talking in a no-nonsense way for aggression.

— Richard Dawkins

There are quite a lot of YouTube clips of me that have gone viral. One that I think of is of a young woman at a lecture I was giving - she came from Liberty University, which is a ludicrous religious institution. She said, 'What if you are wrong?' and I answered that rather briefly, and that's gone viral.

— Richard Dawkins

The whole idea of creating saints, it's pure 'Monty Python.' They have to clock up two miracles.

— Richard Dawkins

Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang, but interposing an outside intelligence does nothing to add to that knowledge, as we still know nothing about the creation of that intelligence.

— Richard Dawkins

Segregation has no place in the education system.

— Richard Dawkins

If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.

— Richard Dawkins

The world is well supplied with spiders whose male ancestors died after mating. The world is bereft of spiders whose would-be ancestors never mated in the first place.

— Richard Dawkins

What's going to happen when I die? I may be buried, or I may be cremated, I may give my body to science. I haven't decided yet.

— Richard Dawkins

Pantheists are a little vague about what they believe. They say things like ‘My god is everything’ or ‘My god is nature’ or ‘My god is the universe’. Or ‘My god is the deep mystery of everything we don’t understand’. The great Albert Einstein used the word ‘God’ in pretty much this last sense. That’s very different from a god who listens to your prayers, reads your innermost thoughts and forgives (or punishes) your sins—all of which the Abrahamic God is supposed to do. Einstein was adamant that he didn’t believe in a personal god who does any of those things.

— Richard Dawkins

There's clearly a lot of Ludditism, and you see it in all the hysteria about every scientific story.

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it's not supernatural.

— Richard Dawkins

Anybody who has something sensible or worthwhile to say should be able to say it calmly and soberly, relying on the words themselves to convey his meaning, without resorting to yelling.

— Richard Dawkins

The obvious objections to the execution of Saddam Hussein are valid and well aired. His death will provoke violent strife between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and between Iraqis in general and the American occupation forces.

— Richard Dawkins

I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist.

— Richard Dawkins

The earliest books in the New Testament to be written were the Epistles, not the Gospels. It's almost as though Saint Paul and others who wrote the Epistles weren't that interested in whether Jesus was real.

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.

— Richard Dawkins

You can legally lie about the real world to your heart's content, but until some human being is materially damaged, nobody will complain.

— Richard Dawkins

As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.

— Richard Dawkins

Although many of us fear death, I think there is something illogical about it.

— Richard Dawkins

Even if you believe a creator god invented the laws of physics, would you so insult him as to suggest that he might capriciously and arbitrarily violate them in order to walk on water, or turn water into wine as a cheap party trick at a wedding?

— Richard Dawkins

The universe doesn't owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn't owe us a nice warm feeling inside.

— Richard Dawkins

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

— Richard Dawkins

You can't imagine how gratifying it is to have a reader come up to you and say, 'You changed my life.'

— Richard Dawkins

I think I would abolish schools which systematically inculcate sectarian beliefs.

— Richard Dawkins

The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it - language, art, science - seemed to have evolved only once. The eye, by contrast, independently evolved 40 times. So, if you were to 'replay' evolution, the eye would almost certainly appear again, whereas the big brain probably wouldn't.

— Richard Dawkins

I do understand people when they say that you destroy the magic of childhood if you encourage too much skeptical questioning.

— Richard Dawkins

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

— Richard Dawkins

There is no refutation of Darwinian evolution in existence. If a refutation ever were to come about, it would come from a scientist, and not an idiot.

— Richard Dawkins

Compassionate doctors sometimes lie to patients about the severity of their condition, and it is not always wrong to do so.

— Richard Dawkins

From a Darwinian perspective, it is clear what pain is doing. It's a warning: 'Don't do that again.' If you burn yourself, you're never going to pick up a live coal again.

— Richard Dawkins

Christopher Hitchens was a great warrior, a magnificent orator, a pugilist and a gentleman. He was kind, but he took no prisoners when arguing with idiots.

— Richard Dawkins

Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.

— Richard Dawkins

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

— Richard Dawkins

Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.

— Richard Dawkins

If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle.

— Richard Dawkins

Teachers who help to open young minds perform a duty which is as near sacred as I will admit.

— Richard Dawkins

Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It's a sort of crime against childhood.

— Richard Dawkins

I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.

— Richard Dawkins

I think the world's always a better place if people are filled with understanding.

— Richard Dawkins

Just because science can't in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn't mean that religion can. It's a simple and logical fallacy to say, ' If science can't do something, therefore religion can'.

— Richard Dawkins

We frequently look into the future of mankind and see dangers. We see if we carry on doing what we are doing in 20 years' time there will be no rainforests left, just to use one example. Looking into the future may be one of the reasons that brains evolved in the first place.

— Richard Dawkins

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

— Richard Dawkins

I don't know what to think about magic and fairy tales.

— Richard Dawkins

What worries me about religion is that it teaches people to be satisfied with not understanding the world they live in.

— Richard Dawkins

The central dogma of the New Testament is that Jesus died as a scapegoat for the sin of Adam and the sins that all we unborn generations might have been contemplating in the future. Adam's sin is perhaps mitigated by the extenuating circumstance that he didn't exist.

— Richard Dawkins

It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

— Richard Dawkins

Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

— Richard Dawkins

The popularity of the paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement. I think that the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same appetite which drives the best of true science, and it is an appetite which true science is best qualified to satisfy.

— Richard Dawkins

An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version.

— Richard Dawkins

More generally it is completely unrealistic to claim, as Gould and many others do, that religion keeps itself away from science's turf, restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.

— Richard Dawkins

Placebos work.

— Richard Dawkins

An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

— Richard Dawkins

Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it.

— Richard Dawkins

Beauty arises out of human inspiration.

— Richard Dawkins

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

— Richard Dawkins

I'm sure Obama is an atheist; I'm sure Kennedy was an atheist, but I doubt if Pope Frank is.

— Richard Dawkins

Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional "next world" is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them.

— Richard Dawkins

If I say that I am more interested in preventing the slaughter of large whales than I am in improving housing conditions for people, I am likely to shock some of my friends.

— Richard Dawkins

Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous.

— Richard Dawkins

You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.

— Richard Dawkins

If it's really true, that the museum at Liberty University has dinosaur fossils which are labelled as being 3000 years old, then that is an educational disgrace. It is debauching the whole idea of a university, and I would strongly encourage any members of Liberty University who may be here... to leave and go to a proper university.

— Richard Dawkins

If saying that religion should be a private matter and should not have special influence in public life is illiberal, then 74% of U.K. Christians are illiberal, too.

— Richard Dawkins

It's obvious that in an intelligent educated audience such as this university, I stress this university. Who saw fit to give them accreditation?

— Richard Dawkins

If you were to actually travel around schools and universities and listen in on lectures about evolution, you might find a fairly substantial fraction of young people, without knowing what it is they disapprove of, think they disapprove of it, because they've been brought up to.

— Richard Dawkins

We are a unique ape. We have language. Other animals have systems of communication that fall far short of that. They don't have the same ability to communicate complicated conditionals and what-ifs and talk about things that are not present.

— Richard Dawkins

Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang, but interposing an outside intelligence does nothing to add to that knowledge, as we still know nothing about the creation of that intelligence.

— Richard Dawkins

The wheel may be one of those cases where the engineering solution can be seen in plain view, yet be unattainable in evolution because it lies [on] the other side of a deep valley, cutting unbridgeably across the massif of Mount Improbable.

— Richard Dawkins

To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.

— Richard Dawkins

I'm not one of those who wants to stop Christian traditions. This is historically a Christian country. I'm a cultural Christian the same way as many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims. So, yes, I love singing carols along with everybody else. I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.

— Richard Dawkins

We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.

— Richard Dawkins

What's to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn't right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question.

— Richard Dawkins

I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research.

— Richard Dawkins

It's almost impossible to say anything against Islam in this country, because you are accused of being racist or Islamophobic.

— Richard Dawkins

We are a very, very unusual species.

— Richard Dawkins

Our ethics and our politics assume, largely without question or serious discussion, that the division between human and 'animal' is absolute. 'Pro-life', to take just one example, is a potent political badge, associated with a gamut of ethical issues such as opposition to abortion and euthanasia.

— Richard Dawkins

I don't feel depressed. I feel elated.

— Richard Dawkins

The absolute morality that the religious person might profess would include what, stoning people for adultery, death for apostasy, punishment for breaking the Sabbath; these are all things which are religiously based absolute moralities. I don’t think I want an absolute morality. I think I want a morality that is thought-out, reasoned, argued, discussed—based upon, almost say—intelligent design. Can we not design our society which has the sort of morality, the sort of society we want to live in?

— Richard Dawkins

When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.

— Richard Dawkins

I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

As a liberal I would hesitate to propose a blanket ban on any style of dress because of the implications for individual liberty and freedom of choice.

— Richard Dawkins

My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.

— Richard Dawkins

Every person I met believes if there is any disagreement between the Koran and science, then the Koran wins. It's just utterly deplorable. These are now British children who are having their minds stuffed with alien rubbish. Occasionally, my colleagues lecturing in universities lament having undergraduate students walk out of their classes when they talk about evolution. This is almost entirely Muslims.

— Richard Dawkins

People say I'm shrill and strident.

— Richard Dawkins

I can't be sure God does not exist... On a scale of seven, where one means I know he exists, and seven I know he doesn't, I call myself a six... That doesn't mean I'm absolutely confident, that I absolutely know, because I don't.

— Richard Dawkins

I did not end up as broadly educated as my Cambridge colleagues, but I graduated probably better equipped to write a book on my chosen subject.

— Richard Dawkins

I am often accused of expressing contempt and despising religious people. I don't despise religious people, I despise what they stand for. I like to quote the British journalist Johann Hari who said, "I have so much respect for you, that I cannot respect your ridiculous ideas."

— Richard Dawkins

I want very much to communicate science to as wide an audience as possible, but not at a cost of dumbing down, and not at a cost in getting things right.

— Richard Dawkins

What I can’t understand is why you can’t see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing – that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?”

— Richard Dawkins

For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.

— Richard Dawkins

I'm not clever enough to be a physicist.

— Richard Dawkins

As a liberal, I would hesitate to propose a blanket ban on any style of dress because of the implications for individual liberty and freedom of choice.

— Richard Dawkins

I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don't look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can't find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.

— Richard Dawkins

It's a difficult business, finding out what's true about the world, the universe.

— Richard Dawkins

Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him.

— Richard Dawkins

Of course you can use the products of science to do bad things, but you can use them to do good things, too.

— Richard Dawkins

I'm sure Obama is an atheist, I’m sure Kennedy was an atheist, but I doubt if Pope Frank is.

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

We’re too stupid to decide on EU (that includes me)

— Richard Dawkins

We have the power to turn against our creators.

— Richard Dawkins

I think there really is a place for science in literature and I think that may be increasing

— Richard Dawkins

We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.

— Richard Dawkins

People are terrified of being thought racist, there’s an awful confusion in many people’s minds. They think Islam is a race, which of course it isn’t

— Richard Dawkins

If you think about it, 534 members of the U.S. Congress cannot all be religious. That's just statistical nonsense. Many of them are quite well-educated.

— Richard Dawkins

If you’re seen to criticise Islam you are often accused of racism, which is absurd.

— Richard Dawkins

A universe with a creator would be a totally different kind of universe, scientifically speaking, than one without.

— Richard Dawkins

I’m all for offending people’s religion. I think it should be offended at every opportunity

— Richard Dawkins

How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair defends them on grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a school whose head of science believes the world is less than 10,000 years old.

— Richard Dawkins

In the case of immigrants from Syria and Iraq I would like to see special preference given to apostates, people who have given up Islam, they are in particular danger.

— Richard Dawkins

Coming out as an atheist can cost an academic his or her job in some parts of America, and many choose to keep quiet about their atheism.

— Richard Dawkins

science is the best way to do anything (if you want to do terrible things with technology, a terrible weapons for example science is the best way to do it because science is the best way to do anything)

— Richard Dawkins

I get the feeling more and more that religion is being left behind.

— Richard Dawkins

evidence is the only good reason to believe anything

— Richard Dawkins

Many people want to send their children to faith schools because they get good exam results, but they're not foolish enough to believe that it's because of faith that they get good exam results.

— Richard Dawkins

The selfish gene theory is Darwin’s theory, expressed in a way that Darwin did not choose but whose aptness, I should like to think, he would instantly have recognized and delighted in. It is in fact a logical outgrowth of orthodox neo-Darwinism, but expressed as a novel image. Rather than focus on the individual organism, it takes a gene’s eye view of nature. It is a different way of seeing, not a different theory.

— Richard Dawkins

I would like to find a way in which people in Saudi Arabia could learn that they can be something other than a Muslim. Some people may not realize this. Of course, there is the problem that you can get in trouble or get stoned.

— Richard Dawkins

We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

— Richard Dawkins

Any teaching of falsehoods in science classes should certainly be identified and stopped by school inspectors. School inspectors should be looking at science teachings to make sure they are evidence-based science.

— Richard Dawkins

We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?

— Richard Dawkins

People really, really hate their religion being criticized. It's as though you've said they had an ugly face; they seem to identify personally with it.

— Richard Dawkins

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. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

— Richard Dawkins

Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.

— Richard Dawkins

I'm afraid the Internet is filled with people using really very intemperate language.

— Richard Dawkins

The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.

— Richard Dawkins

The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.

— Richard Dawkins

You could give

— Richard Dawkins

I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave.

— Richard Dawkins

I certainly would absolutely never do what some of my American colleagues do and object to religious symbols being used, putting crosses up in the public square and things like that. I don't fret about that at all; I'm quite happy about that.

— Richard Dawkins

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.

— Richard Dawkins

But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

— Richard Dawkins

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

— 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

I was confirmed at my prep school at the age of 13.

— Richard Dawkins

Genes do indirectly control the manufacture of bodies, and the influence is strictly one way: acquired characteristics are not inherited. No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch.

— Richard Dawkins

I love words.

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

No doubt some of your cousins and great-uncles died in childhood, but not a single one of your ancestors did. Ancestors just don't die young!

— Richard Dawkins

Of course in science there are things that are open to doubt and things need to be discussed. But among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know.

— Richard Dawkins

Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines that who can only learn of the basis of trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. ...The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology.

— Richard Dawkins

I mean I think that when you've got a big brain, when you find yourself planted in a world with a brain big enough to understand quite a lot of what you see around you, but not everything, you naturally fall to thinking about the deep mysteries. Where do we come from? Where does the world come from? Where does the universe come from?

— Richard Dawkins

The genes are the master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.

— Richard Dawkins

The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.

— Richard Dawkins

Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends.

— Richard Dawkins

At least the fundamentalists haven't tried to dilute their message. Their faith is exposed for what it is for all to see.

— Richard Dawkins

… it is certainly wrong to condemn poor old Homo Sapiens as the only species to kill his own kind, the only inheritor of the mark of Cain, and similar melodramatic charges.

— Richard Dawkins

Science coverage could be improved by the recognition that science is timeless, and therefore science stories should not need to be pegged to an item in the news.

— Richard Dawkins

Group selection theory would therefore predict a tendency to evolve towards an all-dove conspiracy … But the trouble with conspiracies, even those that are to everybody's advantage in the long run, is that they are open to abuse.

— Richard Dawkins

We've all been brought up with the view that religion has some kind of special privileged status. You're not allowed to criticise it.

— Richard Dawkins

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

— Richard Dawkins

… a lion wants to eat an antelope's body, but the antelope has very different plans for its body. This is not normally regarded as competition for a resource, but logically it is hard to see why not.

— Richard Dawkins

I live in a post-Christian world in Oxford; it is quite rare to meet somebody who is religious in academic life now, and there is absolutely no tendency for rioting and mayhem, and it is extremely civilised.

— Richard Dawkins

What is the selfish gene? It is not just one single physical bit of DNA. Just as in the primeval soup, it is all replicas of a particular bit of DNA, distributed throughout the world.

— Richard Dawkins

It is immoral to brand children with religion. 'This is a Catholic child.' 'That is a Muslim child.' I want everyone to flinch when they hear such a phrase, just as they would if they heard, 'That is a Marxist child.'

— Richard Dawkins

… a gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness.

— Richard Dawkins

Why did humans lose their body hair? Why did they start walking on their hind legs? Why did they develop big brains? I think that the answer to all three questions is sexual selection.

— Richard Dawkins

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.

— Richard Dawkins

It is normally possible to be much more certain who your children are than who your brothers are. And you can be more certain still who you yourself are!

— Richard Dawkins

I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.

— Richard Dawkins

The truth is that all examples of child protection and parental care, and all associated bodily organs … are examples of the working in nature of the kin-selection principle.

— Richard Dawkins

I wouldn't want to have the thought police going to people's homes, dictating what they teach their children. I don't want to be Big Brotherish. I would hate that.

— Richard Dawkins

But you cannot have an unnatural welfare state, unless you also have unnatural birth control, otherwise the end result will be misery even greater than that which obtains in nature.

— Richard Dawkins

Religious organisations have an automatic tax-free charitable status.

— Richard Dawkins

… leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods … express a preference for "natural" methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.

— Richard Dawkins

Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: It gives them something to do.

— Richard Dawkins

Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Yet it is quite probable that she bares not a single one of the old king's genes.

— Richard Dawkins

Let 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

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

— Richard Dawkins

'What is the purpose of the universe?' is a silly question.

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

— Richard Dawkins

There are people who try to get atheists to form a sort of atheist church and have atheist community singsongs and things. I don't see the need for that, but if people want to do it, why shouldn't they?

— Richard Dawkins

Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

— Richard Dawkins

A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.

— Richard Dawkins

Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.

— Richard Dawkins

I've never been the sort of firebrand that I've been made out to be. I'm actually quite a mild person.

— Richard Dawkins

Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

— Richard Dawkins

If there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection.

— Richard Dawkins

The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.

— Richard Dawkins

If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it.

— Richard Dawkins

Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives.

— Richard Dawkins

I guess the Democrats have to pretend to be more pious than the Republicans because they are under suspicion of not being.

— Richard Dawkins

To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer.

— Richard Dawkins

I detest 'Jingle Bells,' 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,' and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.

— Richard Dawkins

Our subjective judgment of what seems like a good bet is irrelevant to what is actually a good bet.

— Richard Dawkins

Notoriously, the United States is the most religious of the Western advanced nations. It's a bit mysterious why that is.

— Richard Dawkins

Contrary to earlier prejudices, there is nothing inherently progressive about evolution.

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

Evolution normally does not come to a halt, but constantly ‘tracks’ the changing environment.

— Richard Dawkins

I did a film that's on YouTube of me reading hate mail with a woman playing the cello in the background.

— Richard Dawkins

It is generally characteristic of arms races, including human ones, that although all would be better off if none of them escalated, so long as one of them escalates none can afford not to.

— Richard Dawkins

There are risks in the sheer brevity of Twitter, and it's actually quite an elegant art reducing what you have to say to 140 characters, and it's something that I quite enjoy attempting to do.

— Richard Dawkins

There has been progress in design, but not progress in accomplishment.

— Richard Dawkins

A constellation is not an entity at all, not the kind of thing that Uranus, or anything else, can sensibly be said to 'move into.'

— Richard Dawkins

The successful scientist and the raving crank are separated by the quality of their inspirations. But I suspect that this amounts, in practice, to a difference, not so much in ability to notice analogies as in ability to reject foolish analogies and pursue helpful ones.

— Richard Dawkins

Even if 'going retrograde' or 'moving into Aquarius' were real phenomena, something that planets actually do, what influence could they possibly have on human events? A planet is so far away that its gravitational pull on a new-born baby would be swamped by the gravitational pull of the doctor's paunch.

— Richard Dawkins

There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism.

— Richard Dawkins

If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.

— Richard Dawkins

This not only misses the point, it is the precise antithesis of the point.

— Richard Dawkins

Either Jesus had a father, or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it.

— Richard Dawkins

There is one particular property of living things, however, that I want to single out as explicable only by Darwinian selection. This property is the one that has been the recurring topic of this book: adaptive complexity.

— Richard Dawkins

The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the U.S. leads the world by miles.

— Richard Dawkins

We are a unique ape. We have language. Other animals have systems of communication that fall far short of that. They don't have the same ability to communicate complicated conditionals and what-ifs and talk about things that are not present.

— Richard Dawkins

Another force driving progressive evolution is the so-called "arms-race." Prey animals evolve faster running speeds because predators do. Consequently predators have to evolve even faster running speeds, and so on, in an escalating spiral. Such arms races probably account for the spectacularly advanced engineering of eyes, ears, brains, bat "radar" and all the other high-tech weaponry that animals display.

— Richard Dawkins

George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden.

— Richard Dawkins

It may be that brain hardware has co-evolved with the internal virtual worlds that it creates. This can be called hardware-software co-evolution.

— Richard Dawkins

There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists.

— Richard Dawkins

It is an article of passionate faith among "politically correct" biologists and anthropologists that brain size has no connection with intelligence; that intelligence has nothing to do with genes; and that genes are probably nasty fascist things anyway.

— Richard Dawkins

People like to trace their ancestry.

— Richard Dawkins

The likelihood is that, in 100,000 years time, we shall either have reverted to wild barbarism, or else civilisation will have advanced beyond all recognition – into colonies in outer space, for instance. In either case, evolutionary extrapolations from present conditions are likely to be highly misleading.

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

The late Christopher Evans, a psychologist and author, calculated that if the motor car had evolved as fast as the computer, and over the same time period, "Today you would be able to buy a Rolls-Royce for £35, it would do three million miles to the gallon, and it would deliver enough power to drive the QE2 And if you were interested in miniaturisation, you could place half a dozen of them on a pinhead."

— Richard Dawkins

To put it bluntly, American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.

— Richard Dawkins

Scientific and technological progress themselves are value-neutral. They are just very good at doing what they do. If you want to do selfish, greedy, intolerant and violent things, scientific technology will provide you with by far the most efficient way of doing so. But if you want to do good, to solve the world's problems, to progress in the best value-laden sense, once again, there is no better means to those ends than the scientific way.

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

I have just discovered that without her father's consent this sweet, trusting, gullible six-year-old is being sent, for weekly instruction, to a Roman Catholic nun. What chance has she?

— Richard Dawkins

We have a huge amount of DNA in common with jellyfish.

— Richard Dawkins

With so many mind-bytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort.

— Richard Dawkins

What's wrong with being elitist if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive?

— Richard Dawkins

Think about the two qualities that a virus, or any sort of parasitic replicator, demands of a friendly medium, the two qualities that make cellular machinery so friendly towards parasitic DNA, and that make computers so friendly towards computer viruses. These qualities are, firstly, a readiness to replicate information accurately, perhaps with some mistakes that are subsequently reproduced accurately; and, secondly, a readiness to obey instructions encoded in the information so replicated.

— Richard Dawkins

Public sharing is an important part of science.

— Richard Dawkins

An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version.

— Richard Dawkins

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

— Richard Dawkins

Ten years ago, you could have traveled thousands of miles through the United States and never seen a baseball cap turned back to front. Today, the reverse baseball cap is ubiquitous. I do not know what the pattern of geographical spread of the reverse baseball cap precisely was, but epidemiology is certainly among the professions primarily qualified to study it.

— Richard Dawkins

Humans have a proven track record in taking over planes by the use of threats, which work because the legitimate pilots value their own lives and those of their passengers.

— Richard Dawkins

Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it. Accepting that a virus might be difficult to detect in your own mind, what tell-tale signs might you look out for? I shall answer by imaging how a medical textbook might describe the typical symptoms of a sufferer (arbitrarily assumed to be male).

— Richard Dawkins

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

— Richard Dawkins

If your plane is being hijacked by an armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants to go on living, there is room for bargaining.

— Richard Dawkins

The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as "faith".

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

I can handle heckling on evolution because it's my own field.

— Richard Dawkins

Mitochondrial DNA is blessedly celibate. (p.53)

— Richard Dawkins

The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.

— Richard Dawkins

I'm not much given to straight, irony-free hero-worship.

— Richard Dawkins

The world becomes full of organisms that have what it takes to become ancestors. That, in a sentence, is Darwinism.

— Richard Dawkins

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

— Richard Dawkins

The usefulness of science is sometimes exaggerated. You'd never talk about music being useful or art being useful.

— Richard Dawkins

Each generation is a filter, a sieve; good genes tend to fall through the sieve into the next generation; bad genes tend to end up in bodies that die young or without reproducing.

— Richard Dawkins

Although many of us fear death, I think there is something illogical about it.

— Richard Dawkins

We have to find our own purposes in life, which are not derived directly from our scientific history.

— Richard Dawkins

… you need more than luck to navigate successfully through a thousand sieves in succession.

— Richard Dawkins

Something pretty mysterious had to give rise to the origin of the universe.

— Richard Dawkins

In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science because it was for the good of the Communist Party.

— Richard Dawkins

The river of my title is a river of DNA, and it flows through time, not space. It is a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues.

— Richard Dawkins

Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it.

— Richard Dawkins

I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there's a scientific lesson, for example - when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That's actually very valuable.

— Richard Dawkins

… the genetic code is in fact literally identical in all animals, plants and bacteria … All earthly living things are certainly descended from a single ancestor.

— Richard Dawkins

Do you advocate the Ten Commandments as a guide to the good life? Then I can only presume that you don't know the Ten Commandments.

— Richard Dawkins

I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true.

— Richard Dawkins

I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when you're being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have to improvise, you can change sentences around, and they're not exactly right.

— Richard Dawkins

What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital.

— Richard Dawkins

If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it.

— Richard Dawkins

It doesn't hurt my feeling when I get vilified by fundamentalist religious people. I've actually made comedy out of it. I've made light of that.

— Richard Dawkins

There is no spirit-driven life force, no throbbing, heaving, pullulating, protoplasmic, mystic jelly. Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information.

— Richard Dawkins

I'm fascinated by the idea that genetics is digital. A gene is a long sequence of coded letters, like computer information. Modern biology is becoming very much a branch of information technology.

— Richard Dawkins

I didn't know children were expected to have literary heroes, but I certainly had one, and I even identified with him at one time: Doctor Dolittle, whom I now half identify with the Charles Darwin of Beagle days.

— Richard Dawkins

Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.

— Richard Dawkins

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.

— Richard Dawkins

It is a lamentable observation that because of the way our laws are skewed toward the plaintiff, London has become the libel capital of the world.

— Richard Dawkins

Your DNA may be destined to mingle with mine. Salutations!

— Richard Dawkins

Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.

— Richard Dawkins

I've always been very suspicious of the left-right dimension in politics.

— Richard Dawkins

Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, "I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection". I have dubbed this kind of fallacy "the Argument from Personal Incredulity". Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience.

— Richard Dawkins

My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans.

— Richard Dawkins

Tortoises can survive for weeks without food or water, easily long enough to float in the Humboldt Current from South America to the Galapagos Islands.

— Richard Dawkins

… it seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye … It's no wonder "the" eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom … It is a geological blink.

— Richard Dawkins

Words are not trivial. They matter because they raise consciousness.

— Richard Dawkins

Saddam Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran/Iraq war, of the invasion of Kuwait, and of the subsequent era of sanctions culminating in the current invasion.

— Richard Dawkins

This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous – indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

— Richard Dawkins

In Britain, Christianity is dying. Islam, unfortunately, isn't.

— Richard Dawkins

If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible.

— Richard Dawkins

If there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports? … Is He manoeuvring to maximise David Attenborough's television ratings?

— Richard Dawkins

Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated social evolution.

— Richard Dawkins

God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs.

— Richard Dawkins

… the true utility function of life, that which is being maximised in the natural world, is DNA survival. But DNA is not floating free; it is locked up in living bodies and it has made the most of the levers of power at its disposal.

— Richard Dawkins

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.

— Richard Dawkins

When a company seeks a new chief executive officer, or a university a new vice-chancellor, enormous trouble is taken to find the best person.

— Richard Dawkins

We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us – through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology – that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.

— Richard Dawkins

Einstein was adamant in rejecting all ideas of a personal god.

— Richard Dawkins

In the 1920s and 1930s, scientists from both the political left and right would not have found the idea of designer babies particularly dangerous - though, of course, they would not have used that phrase.

— Richard Dawkins

Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature.

— Richard Dawkins

I love romantic poetry.

— Richard Dawkins

The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe.

— Richard Dawkins

… but the dominance hierarchy itself is not something that natural selection favours or disfavours. What natural selection favours or disfavours is the individual behaviour of which the dominance hierarchy is a manifestation. I would put war and overpopulation in that category.

— Richard Dawkins

What Darwinian theory shows us is that all human races are extremely close to each other. None of them is in any sense ancestral to any other; none of them is more primitive than any other. We are all modern races of exactly equal status, evolutionarily speaking.

— Richard Dawkins

I have begun several projects which were never completed, not necessarily because they failed, but because I got interested in other things.

— Richard Dawkins

There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

Nico Tinbergen was my doctoral supervisor, and he was a benign, avuncular sort of influence; everybody loved him.

— Richard Dawkins

Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But it cannot have been the sort of God that we need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early.

— Richard Dawkins

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

— Richard Dawkins

I think a fundamentalist is somebody who believes something unshakably and isn't going to change their mind.

— Richard Dawkins

It is a very helpful insight to say we are vehicles for our DNA, we are hosts for DNA parasites which are our genes. Those are insights which help us to understand an aspect of life. But it's emotive to say, that's all there is to it, we might as well give up going to Shakespeare plays and give up listening to music and things, because that's got nothing to do with it. That's an entirely different subject.

— Richard Dawkins

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?