Richard Dawkins Quotes & Sayings

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

#2. Nature is a miserly accountant, grudging the pennies, watching the clock, punishing the smallest extravagance.

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

Richard Dawkins

#4. There are some weird things (such as the Trinity, transubstantiation, incarnation) that we are not meant to understand. Don't even try to understand one of these, for the attempt might destroy it. Learn how to gain fulfilment in calling it a mystery.

Richard Dawkins

#5. I am not attacking any particular God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, whenever or wherever they have been or will be invented.

Richard Dawkins

#6. 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

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

Richard Dawkins

#8. Atheists are the new gays; in the closet and pretty much disqualified from public office.

Richard Dawkins

#9. 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

#10. I am persuaded that 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like ... eternal hell.

Richard Dawkins

#11. 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

#12. The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice - or not yet - a decided one. So also is the truth or falsehood of every one of the miracle stories that religions rely upon to impress multitudes of the faithful.

Richard Dawkins

#13. And the beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here.

Richard Dawkins

#14. What kind of ethical philosophy is it that condemns every child, even before it is born, to inherit the sin of a remote ancestor? Augustine,

Richard Dawkins

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

Richard Dawkins

#16. The fear of Hell is a very powerful motivation.

Richard Dawkins

#17. tried to impose 'intelligent design' creationism on the science curriculum of a local public school - a move of 'breathtaking inanity', to quote Judge Jones

Richard Dawkins

#18. 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

#19. If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have to
look.

Richard Dawkins

#20. As my colleague, the physical chemist Peter Atkins, puts it, we must be equally agnostic about the theory that there is a teapot in orbrit around the planet Pluto. We can't disprove it. But that doesn't mean the theory that there is a teapot is on level terms with the theory that there isn't.

Richard Dawkins

#21. Smolin's idea, expounded in The Life of the Cosmos, hinges

Richard Dawkins

#22. Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.

Richard Dawkins

#23. If you have Mozart to listen to, why would you need God?

Richard Dawkins

#24. Alister McGrath has now written two books with my name in the title. The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, 'was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

Richard Dawkins

#25. One gene may be regarded as a unit that survives through a large number of successive individual bodies.

Richard Dawkins

#26. People who believe in something for which there is not a shred of evidence act on that belief and, above all, impose their beliefs on others, they make me cross, and they make me especially cross when they impose their beliefs on defenceless children.

Richard Dawkins

#27. To describe religions as mind viruses is sometimes interpreted as contemptuous or even hostile. It is both. I am often asked why I am so hostile to organized religion.

Richard Dawkins

#28. A medieval cathedral could consume a hundred man-centuries in its construction, yet was never used as a dwelling, or for any recognizably useful purpose.

Richard Dawkins

#29. When challenged by a zealous Popperian to say how evolution could ever be falsified, J. B. S. Haldane famously growled: 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.

Richard Dawkins

#30. Evolution never looks to the future.

Richard Dawkins

#31. Why did it take so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene? What delayed humanity's tumbling to that luminously simple idea which seems, on the face of it, so much easier to grasp than the mathematical ideas given us by Newton two centuries earlier - or, indeed, by Archimedes two millennia earlier?

Richard Dawkins

#32. If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature.

Richard Dawkins

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

Richard Dawkins

#34. The resemblance of the signs of the zodiac to the animals after which they are named ... is as unimpressive as the predictions of astrologers.

Richard Dawkins

#35. The feminists taught us about consciousness-raising.

Richard Dawkins

#36. Two religions cannot both be right, because they contradict each other, yet they can both be wrong.

Richard Dawkins

#37. The chicken is only an egg's way for making another egg.

Richard Dawkins

#38. It would be so nice if those who oppose evolution would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is that they are opposing.

Richard Dawkins

#39. If all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism, I would be the first to admit it, and I would immediately change my mind. As things stand, however, all available evidence (and there is a vast amount of it) favours evolution.

Richard Dawkins

#40. 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

#41. Evolution is just a theory? Well, so is gravity and I don't see you jumping out of buildings.

Richard Dawkins

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

Richard Dawkins

#43. Along with William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin is Britain's greatest gift to the world. He was our greatest thinker.

Richard Dawkins

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

Richard Dawkins

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

Richard Dawkins

#46. I could easily believe that religion could enhance health and hence survival, and that therefore there could be indeed be literally Darwinian survival value, Darwinian selection in favor of religion. None of that of course bears at all upon the truth value of the claims made by religions.

Richard Dawkins

#47. Areas where there is a lack of data, or a lack of understanding, are automatically assumed to belong, by default, to God.

Richard Dawkins

#48. It is in the light of the unparalleled presumption of respect for religion* that I make my own disclaimer for this book. I shall not go out of my way to offend, but nor shall I don kid gloves to handle religion any more gently than I would handle anything else.

Richard Dawkins

#49. Religion is a distraction from true education.

Richard Dawkins

#50. The Bible was written by fallible human beings.

Richard Dawkins

#51. Religious people are atheists about all other gods, atheists only take it one god further.

Richard Dawkins

#52. they experience - what they see, hear, think, and

Richard Dawkins

#53. There's no point of having faith if you have evidence.

Richard Dawkins

#54. Matthew and Luke handle the problem differently, by deciding that Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem after all. But they get him there by different routes.

Richard Dawkins

#55. The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

Richard Dawkins

#56. Many of us have no grasp of quantum theory, or Einstein's theories of special and general relativity, but this does not in itself lead us to oppose these theories! Darwinism, unlike 'Einsteinism', seems to be regarded as fair game for critics with any degree of ignorance.

Richard Dawkins

#57. Perhaps Islam is analogous to a carnivorous gene complex, Buddhism to a herbivorous one.

Richard Dawkins

#58. 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

#59. It is all too easy to mistake passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will.

Richard Dawkins

#60. In a way, I think religion is to be admired for asking the right questions. I just think it's got the wrong answers.

Richard Dawkins

#61. Saddam Hussein's mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars ... In a small way his execution represents a wanton and vandalistic destruction of important research data.

Richard Dawkins

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

Richard Dawkins

#63. 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

#64. I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody is too polite - or too devout - to notice: religion, and specifically the devaluing effect that religion has on human life.

Richard Dawkins

#65. [Creationists have] lost in the courts of law; they've long ago lost in the halls of science; and they continue to lose with every new piece of evidence in support of evolution. Taking offense is all they've got left.

Richard Dawkins

#66. There is no universally agreed definition of a gene.

Richard Dawkins

#67. Curiously, peace-time appeals for individuals to make some small sacrifice in the rate at which they increase their standard of living seem to be less effective than war-time appeals for individuals to lay down their lives.

Richard Dawkins

#68. My passion is for scientific truth. I don't much care about good and evil. ... I care about what's true.

Richard Dawkins

#69. 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

#70. It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe

Richard Dawkins

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

Richard Dawkins

#72. We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage.

Richard Dawkins

#73. I don't feel depressed. I feel elated.

Richard Dawkins

#74. There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting ... But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.

Richard Dawkins

#75. The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the raising of Lazarus, even the Old Testament miracles, all are freely used for religious propaganda, and they are very effective with an audience of unsophisticates and children

Richard Dawkins

#76. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth.

Richard Dawkins

#77. 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

#78. Gould carried the art of bending over backward to positively supine lengths. Why shouldn't we comment on God, as scientists? ... A universe with a creative superintendent would be a very different kind of universe from one without. Why is that not a scientific matter?

Richard Dawkins

#79. I was never much bothered about moral questions like, 'How could there be a good God when there's so much evil in the world?'

Richard Dawkins

#80. It is interesting to ask whether there's any general reason why being religious might make you do nice things or indeed nasty things. It's possible that people do nice things because they're religious. One reason might be they're hoping for a reward in Heaven, which is not a very noble reason.

Richard Dawkins

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. [A] proper understanding of the magnificence of the real world, while never becoming a religion, can fill the inspirational role that religion has historically - and inadequately -
usurped.

Richard Dawkins

#84. 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

#85. Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once.

Richard Dawkins

#86. With only a little imagination we can see the gene as sitting at the centre of a radiating web of extended phenotypic power.

Richard Dawkins

#87. Let our tribute to the dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe.

Richard Dawkins

#88. Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.

Richard Dawkins

#89. Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.

Richard Dawkins

#90. If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope eventually to understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.

Richard Dawkins

#91. Creative intelligences, being evolved arrived late in the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.

Richard Dawkins

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

Richard Dawkins

#93. The fact that a question can be phrased in a grammatically correct English sentence doesn't make it meaningful, or entitle it to our serious attention.

Richard Dawkins

#94. Evil ... doesn't mean doing things that have bad consequences for people. It means private thoughts and actions that are not to "the Christian majority's" private liking.

Richard Dawkins

#95. 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