Top 100 Richard Dawkins Science Quotes
#1. [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
#2. There are more cells in your brain than there are brains in your entire body.
Richard Dawkins
#3. 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
#4. The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he will say Richard Dawkins. And indeed, Dawkins has done a marvelous job of popularizing Darwinism. But Dawkins' basic theory of the gene being the object of evolution is totally non-Darwinian.
Ernst W. Mayr
#5. As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect.
Richard Dawkins
#6. There is absolutely no reason to believe that those things for which science does not yet have natural explanations will turn out to be of supernatural origin, any more than volcanoes or earthquakes or diseases turn out to be caused by angry deities, as people once believed they were. Of
Richard Dawkins
#7. 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
#8. The priests of the different religious sects . . . dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live. - THOMAS JEFFERSON
Richard Dawkins
#9. 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
#10. I have devoted a whole book (Unweaving the Rainbow) to ultimate meaning, to the poetry of science, and to rebutting, specifically and at length, the charge of nihilistic negativity, so I shall restrain myself here.
Richard Dawkins
#11. Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.
Richard Dawkins
#12. I would like people to appreciate science in the same way they appreciate the arts.
Richard Dawkins
#13. DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
Richard Dawkins
#14. To an honest judge, the alleged marriage between religion and science is a shallow, empty, spin-doctored sham.
Richard Dawkins
#15. Science is the disinterested search for the objective truth about the material world.
Richard Dawkins
#16. All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities
Richard Dawkins
#17. The idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe.
Richard Dawkins
#18. Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam.
Richard Dawkins
#19. 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
#20. 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
#22. In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science because it was for the good of the Communist Party.
Richard Dawkins
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Far too many scientists, including my good friend Richard Dawkins, present science as the truth and present it as factually correct. And actually, of course, that clearly isn't true.
Robert Winston
#26. Science is interesting, and if you don't agree you can fuck off.
Note: Dawkins was quoting a former editor of New Scientist Magazine, who is as yet unidentified (possibly Jeremy Webb)
Richard Dawkins
#27. I know that not all my readers like my digressions, but the research that has been done on Caenorhabditis elegans is such a ringing triumph of science that you aren't going to stop me.
Richard Dawkins
#28. Religions are not imaginative, not poetic, not soulful. On the contrary, they are parochial, small-minded, niggardly with the human imagination, precisely where science is generous.
Richard Dawkins
#29. 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
#30. Science - or the products of science like technology - is just a way of achieving something real, something that happens, something that works.
Richard Dawkins
#31. Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene is a classic example of science fiction.
Pope Benedict XVI
#32. There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.
Richard Dawkins
#33. 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
#34. Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life's hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don't; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions.
Richard Dawkins
#35. There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality
Richard Dawkins
#36. Let's get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering.
Richard Dawkins
#37. Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.
Richard Dawkins
#38. Are science and religion converging? No. There are modern scientists whose words sound religious but whose beliefs, on close examination, turn out to be identical to those of other scientists who straightforwardly call themselves atheists.
Richard Dawkins
#39. To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham.
Richard Dawkins
#40. 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
#41. on page 96 of my hero Peter Medawar's book The Limits of Science: 'I regret my disbelief in God and religious answers generally, for I believe it would give satisfaction and comfort to many in need of it if it were possible to discover good scientific and philosophic reasons to believe in God.
Richard Dawkins
#42. The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.
Richard Dawkins
#43. There aren't that many female role models in science. There are a couple of women, but mostly you've got Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss - they're all guys. Bill Nye the Science Guy. I love that guy, but it's all guys.
Elise Andrew
#44. If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so
Richard Dawkins
#45. 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
#46. Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use.
The mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.
Richard Dawkins
#47. Quantum mechanics, that brilliantly successful flagship theory of modern science, is deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Eastern mystics have always been deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Therefore, Eastern mystics must have been talking about quantum theory all along.
Richard Dawkins
#48. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
Richard Dawkins
#49. Even those who do not, or cannot, avail themselves of a scientific education, choose to benefit from the technology that is made possible by the scientific education of others.
Richard Dawkins
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.
Richard Dawkins
#53. 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
#54. It is interesting to wonder whether taxonomists of the future may regret the way our generation messed around with genomes.
Richard Dawkins
#55. There is no reason to regard God as immune from
consideration along the spectrum of probabilities. And there is
certainly no reason to suppose that, just because God can be neither
proved nor disproved, his probability of existence is 50 per cent.
Richard Dawkins
#56. The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.
Richard Dawkins
#57. Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to
moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written
in it?
Richard Dawkins
#58. I don't understand why so many people who are sophisticated in science go on believing in God. I wish I did.
Richard Dawkins
#59. Religion enjoys astonishing privileges in our societies, privileges denied to almost any other special interest group one can think of-and certainly denied to individuals
Richard Dawkins
#60. Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that.
Richard Dawkins
#61. There may be some deep questions about the cosmos that are forever beyond science. The mistake is to think they are therefore not beyond religion too.
Richard Dawkins
#62. The usefulness of science is sometimes exaggerated. You'd never talk about music being useful or art being useful.
Richard Dawkins
#63. 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
#64. I am passionate about the truth. Passion is very different from fundamentalism.
Richard Dawkins
#65. If we say that religion is a virus, then why isn't science a virus?
Richard Dawkins
#66. Religious people split into three main groups when faced with science. I shall label them the "know-nothings", the "know-alls", and the "no-contests."
Richard Dawkins
#67. The best scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried
Richard Dawkins
#68. A retaliator behaves like a hawk when he is attacked by a hawk, and like a dove when he meets a dove. When he meets another retaliator he plays like a dove. A retaliator is a conditional strategist. His behaviour depends on the behaviour of his opponent.
Richard Dawkins
#69. But if science cannot answer some ultimate question, what makes anybody think that religion can?
Richard Dawkins
#71. 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
#72. 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
#74. 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
#75. Science ha seradicated smallpox, can immunise against most previously deadly viruses, can kill most previously deadly bacteria. Theology has done nothing but talk of pestilence as the wages of sin.
Richard Dawkins
#76. Science is wonderful, science is important, and so are children, so are young people, and so what could be better than to write a science book for young people?
Richard Dawkins
#79. Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious
defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking
after himself.
Richard Dawkins
#80. You can't blame science for being used for evil purposes. What you can do is say, 'This is an exceedingly powerful tool.' And you want to make sure it is used for good purposes, not bad ones. That is a political decision.
Richard Dawkins
#81. Science is but one form of rationalism, while religion is the most common form of superstition.
Richard Dawkins
#82. A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!
Richard Dawkins
#83. Science tells us what we have reason to believe. Not what we have a duty to believe. Not what experts, in their pontificating wisdom, instruct us to believe ... No, science tells us what there is good reason to believe.
Richard Dawkins
#84. Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins.
Richard Dawkins
#85. 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
#86. ... the Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.
Richard Dawkins
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance
Richard Dawkins
#90. Not only is science corrosive to religion, but religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp.
Richard Dawkins
#91. Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when.
Richard Dawkins
#92. Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium.
Richard Dawkins
#93. 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
#94. A herp is simply the kind of animal studied by a herpetologist, and that is a pretty lame way to define an animal. The only other name that comes close is the biblical 'creeping thing
Richard Dawkins
#95. Science is a victim of its own reductive metaphors: 'Big Bang,' 'selfish gene' and so on. Richard Dawkins' selfish gene fitted with the Thatcherite politics of the time. It should actually be the 'altruistic gene,' but he'd never have sold as many books with a title like that.
Charles Jencks
#96. Science doesn't have all the answers, but it is good at spotting the important questions when they are camouflaged against a background of common sense.
Richard Dawkins
#97. However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or
complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't
this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who will
never even be offered life in the first place?
Richard Dawkins
#98. 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
#99. I simply would not accede to being forced into this, and would frequently be kept out of classes because of irreverent comments and mocking this religious stuff. Frankly, it stayed with me to this day. In fact, don't get me going. I'm almost as bad as Richard Dawkins on this issue.
Richard E. Leakey
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
