Top 100 Dawkins's Quotes
#1. As I was passing this man on the street, he looked at me, snarled, and gave me the finger. What was going through his mind? Does he hate shepherds? Or religion? Did he just read Richard Dawkins's book?
A. J. Jacobs
#2. (For the uninitiated, "ectoplasm" is a ghostly kind of stuff that writers like Dennett are constantly accusing critics of materialism of believing in. It plays the same sort of straw-man role in his writings on the mind that Paley does in Dawkins's writings on religion.)
Edward Feser
#3. I attacked Dawkins's book on God because I think he is theologically illiterate.
Terry Eagleton
#4. Dawkins's result can only be obtained because of the element of intelligent design embedded in the whole experiment.
Michael A. Cremo
#5. Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene is a classic example of science fiction.
Pope Benedict XVI
#6. You know what I'm intrigued by? Like, space and wormholes and Stephen Hawking's theories and Richard Dawkins's theories. That's what I care about.
Peaches Geldof
#7. I think it's misleading to use a word like 'God' in the way Einstein did. I'm sorry that Einstein did. I think he was asking for trouble, and he certainly was misunderstood.
Richard Dawkins
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. I don't give a damn for anybody's opinion, I only care about the facts. So I'm not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where factual matters are concerned.
Richard Dawkins
#11. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.
Richard Dawkins
#12. I did a film that's on YouTube of me reading hate mail with a woman playing the cello in the background.
Richard Dawkins
#13. 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
#14. All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.
Richard Dawkins
#15. Faith is belief without evidence and reason; coincidentally that's also the definition of delusion.
Richard Dawkins
#16. In the world of the extended phenotype, ask not how an animal's behaviour benefits its genes; ask instead whose genes it is benefiting.
Richard Dawkins
#17. 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
#18. All qualified physicists, biologists, cosmologists and geologists agree, on the basis of massive, mutually corroborating evidence, that the earth's age is at least four billion years.
Richard Dawkins
#20. 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
#21. I haven't seen much socially redeeming about religion. I'm an atheist. I don't here want to get into the Hitchens- or Dawkins-style attack on religion. I was raised on that. It's boring.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#22. 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
#23. The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.
Richard Dawkins
#24. I think what attracts me about the Electric Monk is that it's such an eloquent example of the futility of belief for belief's sake. I mean there's only any point in believing something if it's true.
Richard Dawkins
#25. Imagine a crime series in which, every week, there is a white suspect and a black suspect. And every week, lo and behold, the black one turns out to have done it. Unpardonable, of course. And my point is that you could not defend it by saying: "But it's only fiction, only entertainment."
Richard Dawkins
#26. I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true.
Richard Dawkins
#27. 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
#28. If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.
Richard Dawkins
#29. 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
#30. Listen to the Reverend Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University: 'AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.'121
Richard Dawkins
#31. 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
#32. If I want to read something that's really giving me something serious and fundamental to think about, about the human condition, if you like, or what we're all doing here, or what's going on, then I'd rather read something by a scientist in the life sciences, like Richard Dawkins, for instance.
Douglas Adams
#33. Smolin's idea, expounded in The Life of the Cosmos, hinges
Richard Dawkins
#34. It is universally accepted that an admission of atheism would be instant political suicide for any (U.S.) presidential candidate.
Richard Dawkins
#35. As J. B. S. Haldane said when asked what evidence might contradict evolution, 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.
Richard Dawkins
#36. Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards.
Richard Dawkins
#37. The higher one's intelligence or education level, the less one is likely to be religious or hold "beliefs" of any kind.
Richard Dawkins
#38. As a child, my wife hated her school and wished she could leave. Years later, when she was in her twenties, she disclosed this unhappy fact to her parents, and her mother was aghast: 'But darling, why didn't you come to us and tell us?' Lalla's reply is my text for today: 'But I didn't know I could.
Richard Dawkins
#39. I don't think that it's up to government to dictate what people should wear.
Richard Dawkins
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. I can handle heckling on evolution because it's my own field.
Richard Dawkins
#45. Writing a computer virus program is child's play. Any fool can do it, which is why the silly little twerps who do have nothing to be proud of.
Richard Dawkins
#46. The meaningless wordplays of modish francophone savants, splendidly exposed in Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Intellectual Impostures (1998), seem to have no other function than to impress the gullible.
Richard Dawkins
#47. No educated person believes the Adam and Eve myth nowadays, but it's surprising how many parents think that it's somehow fun to pass on this falsehood to their children ... I would want to argue that the truth of evolution is more interesting and more poetic
Richard Dawkins
#48. It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself.
Richard Dawkins
#49. It's a difficult business, finding out what's true about the world, the universe.
Richard Dawkins
#50. By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. -this quote is actually found in Carl Sagan's book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, where he attributes it to engineer James Oberg, who says he stole it from someone else.
Richard Dawkins
#51. What's wrong with being elitist if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive?
Richard Dawkins
#52. Suppose that there's a gene that makes you gay if you were bottle-fed but that has some completely different effect if you were breast-fed. So in the days before bottles were invented that gene would not have manifested itself as gay behavior, but now that bottles are common it can do so.
Richard Dawkins
#53. The chicken is only an egg's way for making another egg.
Richard Dawkins
#54. I suspect that both astronomers were, yet again, bending over backwards to be polite: theologians have nothing worthwhile to say about anything else; let's throw them a sop and let them worry away at a couple of questions that nobody can answer and maybe never will.
Richard Dawkins
#55. Selfish genes actually explain altruistic individuals, and to me that's crystal-clear.
Richard Dawkins
#56. People who believe the earth was created 6000 years ago, when it's actually 4.5 billion years old, should also believe the width of North America is 8 yards. That is the scale of the error.
Richard Dawkins
#57. Few would argue that Richard Dawkins is the world's most famous atheist, especially now that his friend and rival for the title, Christopher Hitchens, has now gone to meet his Maker.
Ray Comfort
#58. It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.
Richard Dawkins
#59. 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
#60. Along with William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin is Britain's greatest gift to the world. He was our greatest thinker.
Richard Dawkins
#61. Look carefully at any region of the world where you find intractable enmity and violence between rival groups today. I cannot guarantee that you'll find religions as the dominant labels for in-groups and out-groups. But it's a good bet.
Richard Dawkins
#62. 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
#63. Even if it were true that we need God to be moral, it would of course not make God's existence more likely, merely more desirable (many people cannot tell the difference)
Richard Dawkins
#64. The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is Enough! Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's divisive and it's dangerous.
Richard Dawkins
#65. I am very hostile to religion because it is enormously dominant, especially in American life. And I don't buy the argument that, well, it's harmless. I think it is harmful, partly because I care passionately about what's true.
Richard Dawkins
#66. What is illiberal is not persuasion but imposition of one's views.
Richard Dawkins
#67. There's no point of having faith if you have evidence.
Richard Dawkins
#68. 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
#69. It's very important to try to inculcate into children moral rules, such as "do as you would be done by."
Richard Dawkins
#70. Paul Davies's The Mind of God seems to hover somewhere between Einsteinian pantheism and an obscure form of deism - for
Richard Dawkins
#71. 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
#72. There is something so mysterious that it is almost like God. God is in the equations. God is in the fundamental constants. And that's fine. I mean, that's just redefinition of that which we find mysterious at the basis of the universe.
Richard Dawkins
#73. The child has no way of knowing what's good information.
Richard Dawkins
#74. Despite the Great Chain of Being's traditional ranking of humans between animals and angels, there is no evolutionary justification for the common assumption that evolution is somehow 'aimed' at humans, or that humans are 'evolution's last word'.
Richard Dawkins
#75. Sometimes I think it's possible to mistake desire for clarity and talking in a no-nonsense way for aggression.
Richard Dawkins
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. Watson retorted: 'Well I don't think we're for anything.
We're just products of evolution. You can say, "Gee, your life must
be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose." But I'm anticipating having a good lunch.' We did have a good lunch, too.
Richard Dawkins
#81. Everyone you meet won't wish you success that's why you work for it and give your life your best.
Kia Marie Dawkins
#82. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.
Richard Dawkins
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. Notoriously, the United States is the most religious of the Western advanced nations. It's a bit mysterious why that is.
Richard Dawkins
#86. There's a mystical strain in every country, and eclipses are likely to bring that out.
Richard Dawkins
#87. 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
#88. We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA ... This is exactly what we are for. We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object's sole reason for living.
Richard Dawkins
#89. 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
#91. I don't actually think 'The Selfish Gene' is a very good title. I think that's one of my worst titles.
Richard Dawkins
#92. 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
#93. None of us will have forgotten that lesson. What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them: education in the true sense, very different from today's assessment-mad exam culture.
Richard Dawkins
#94. My passion is for scientific truth. I don't much care about good and evil. ... I care about what's true.
Richard Dawkins
#95. I'm always striving to do more. Whatever I accomplish, it's not enough. I don't get satisfied.
Brian Dawkins
#96. If you divide Christians into denominations, agnostics and atheists come in third, behind Catholics and Baptists. That's interesting when you contrast it with the lack of influence of nonbelievers.
Richard Dawkins
#97. There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out.
Richard Dawkins
#98. Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It's a sort of crime against childhood.
Richard Dawkins
#99. I think I got hooked up because I try to do good things with the NBA, and they always want somebody who's notable and who's personable with people.
Darryl Dawkins
#100. 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
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