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Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger - even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all - and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes. -- 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
In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science because it was for the good of the Communist Party. -- Richard Dawkins
Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped living things to thrive on the stuff and, indeed, suffocate without it. -- Richard Dawkins
There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism . -- Richard Dawkins
Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong. -- Richard Dawkins
I've been reading an Alabama newspaper that one man shot another man because he beat him in a Bible-quoting competition. -- Richard Dawkins
The idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe. -- Richard Dawkins
Evolutionary psychologists suggest that, just as the eye is an evolved organ for seeing, and the wing an evolved organ for flying, so the brain is a collection of organs (or 'modules') for dealing with a set of specialist data-processing needs. -- Richard Dawkins
There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist, and quite good reasons for believing that they do not exist and never have. It has all been a gigantic waste of time and a waste of life. It would be a joke of cosmic proportions if it weren't so tragic. -- Richard Dawkins
The idea of tiny changes cumulated over many steps is an immensely powerful idea, capable of explaining an enormous range of things that would be otherwise inexplicable. -- 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
Why did God make tigers so good at catching prey, and at the same time make prey so good at getting away from tigers? You'd think that if God wanted one thing or the other to happen he'd have engineered it rather better. Maybe he enjoyed the spectator sport? -- Richard Dawkins
No doubt this works well enough for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I can readily see that 'The Selfish Gene' on its own, without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequate impression of its contents. -- Richard Dawkins
Areas where there is a lack of data, or a lack of understanding, are automatically assumed to belong, by default, to God. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
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
A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian. -- 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 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
Mysteries do not lose their poetry when solved. Quite the contrary; the solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle and, in any case, when you have solved one mystery you uncover others, perhaps to inspire greater poetry -- Richard Dawkins
Religion: Together we can find the cure. -- Richard Dawkins
Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. -- 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
In Britain, you don't usually learn about evolution until you are about 15. I should have thought that you should start at about 8. But I could be wrong about that. -- Richard Dawkins
Gaps, by default in the mind of the creationist, are filled by God. -- Richard Dawkins
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
I find that religion really does motivate people to do horrible things because they have this passionate faith in whatever their religion happens to be, and it teaches them that the other religion is the wrong one. -- 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 odd thing about tradition is, the longer it's been going, the more people seem to take it seriously - as though sheer passage of time makes something which to begin with was just made up, turns it into what people believe as a fact. -- Richard Dawkins
Sometimes I think it's possible to mistake desire for clarity and talking in a no-nonsense way for aggression. -- 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
I know I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case. -- 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
Something pretty mysterious had to give rise to the origin of the universe. -- Richard Dawkins
I don't feel depressed. I feel elated. -- Richard Dawkins
I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an expla nation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc magic. -- Richard Dawkins
It's about time we start criticizing faith. -- 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
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
If the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we should none of us be here. -- 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
I think a fundamentalist is somebody who believes something unshakably and isn't going to change their mind. -- Richard Dawkins
Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and they are good ones, which would probably end up persuading me. But hasn't the time come when we should stop being frightened even to put the question? -- Richard Dawkins
Nico Tinbergen was my doctoral supervisor, and he was a benign, avuncular sort of influence; everybody loved him. -- Richard Dawkins
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
Can omniscient God, who Knows the future, find The omnipotence to Change His future mind? -- Richard Dawkins
[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
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
A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right. -- Richard Dawkins
Next time that somebody tells you 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
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
What impresses me about Catholic mythology is partly its tasteless kitsch but mostly the airy nonchalance with which these people make up the details as they go along. It is just shamelessly invented. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
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
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
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
We have this one life, let's enjoy it, let's live it to the full and don't get so worked up about don't identify yourself so passionately with this business called religion. -- Richard Dawkins
We will not go quietly away. If in the future that requires violence -- Richard Dawkins
In the farsighted words of Thomas Jefferson, writing to his predecessor, John Adams, 'The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. -- Richard Dawkins
We are talking about a bet, remember, and Pascal wasn't claiming that his wager enjoyed anything but very long odds. Would you bet on God's valuing dishonestly faked belief (or even honest belief) over honest scepticism? -- Richard Dawkins
Unweaving the Rainbow -- Richard Dawkins
The efforts of apologists to find genuinely distinguished modern scientists who are religious have an air of desperation, generating the unmistakably hollow sound or bottoms of barrels being scraped. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
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
In Britain, Christianity is dying. Islam, unfortunately, isn't. -- 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
Do you really mean the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward? That's not morality, that's just sucking up. -- Richard Dawkins
You believe that all humanity came from Adam and Eve, and humans have not evolved at all since. So tell me; between the two of them, which was black, which was white, and which was Asian? -- Richard Dawkins
A good theory explains a lot but postulates little. -- Richard Dawkins
Indeed, adherents of scriptural authority show distressingly little curiosity about the (normally highly dubious) historical origins of their holy books. -- Richard Dawkins
I great difficulty having any respect for a religion that has so little confidence in the truth of its beliefs that it feels reduced to using threats in order to propagate those beliefs. -- 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
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. -- Richard Dawkins
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
And we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it. No real fundamentalist would ever say anything like that. -- 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
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
The supernatural is ubiquitous in children's entertainment, from Grimm and Hans Andersen to Disney and 'Harry Potter.' -- Richard Dawkins
You need more than luck to navigate successfully through a thousand sieves in succession. -- Richard Dawkins
True warfare in which large rival armies fight to the death is known only in man and in social insects. -- 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
[The Internet] is by far the most important innovation in the media in my lifetime. It's like having a huge encyclopedia permanently available. There's a tremendous amount of rubbish on the world wide web, but retrieval of what you want to so rapid that it doesn't really matter -- Richard Dawkins
I speculate that we shall come to accept the more radical idea that each one of our genes is a symbiotic unit. We are gigantic colonies of symbiotic genes. -- Richard Dawkins
My reverie jumps me into the middle of the period and I conjure the giant, unforgettable figure of Douglas Adams, sadly absent from the feast. -- Richard Dawkins
The deceitful misquoting of scientists to suit an anti-scientific agenda ranks among the many unchristian habits of fundamentalist authors. -- Richard Dawkins
Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. -- Richard Dawkins
And of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history, the medieval equivalent of the Nigerian Internet scam but far more successful. -- Richard Dawkins
Human psychology has a near universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire. -- Richard Dawkins
The cynic about human nature might say that religious morality is an effective way of keeping people in line. The threat of hell, the reward of heaven, but the rules of the holy books are out of date and often barbaric. -- Richard Dawkins
Predators seem beautifully 'designed' to catch prey animals, while the prey animals seem equally beautifully 'designed' to escape them. Whose side is God on?66 -- 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
I'm afraid the Internet is filled with people using really very intemperate language. -- Richard Dawkins
We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
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
... 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
Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles. -- Richard Dawkins
For all I know, entire scientific reputations may have been built on the work of students and colleagues! I don't know what can be done to combat this dishonesty. -- Richard Dawkins
It touches every aspect of our social lives, our loving and hating, fighting and cooperating, giving and stealing, our greed and our generosity. -- Richard Dawkins
Religion is a powerful weapon that can be used because it persuades people to do things. And thus it can be used for good or ill. But it should not be a powerful weapon at all. -- 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
You go after crude, rabble-rousing chancers like Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, rather than sophisticated theologians like Tillich or Bonhoeffer who teach the sort of religion I believe in. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
Genome sequencing has changed taxonomy. -- Richard Dawkins
Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it? -- Richard Dawkins
The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist. -- Richard Dawkins
THE ARGUMENT FROM ADMIRED RELIGIOUS SCIENTISTS The immense majority of intellectually eminent men disbelieve in Christian religion, but they conceal the fact in public, because they are afraid of losing their incomes. -- 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
suppose the god who confronts you when you die turns out to be Baal, and suppose Baal is just as jealous as his old rival Yahweh was said to be. Mightn't Pascal have been better off wagering on no god at all rather than on the wrong god? -- Richard Dawkins
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
The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'. -- Richard Dawkins
Creationist 'logic' is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine. -- Richard Dawkins
There are very interesting controversies within evolution; however, whether evolution occurs is not one of them. It definitely does. -- 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
My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism. -- Richard Dawkins
Humans are just a very, very small part of the panoply of life, and it is arguable that in a certain sense, humans have emancipated themselves from Darwinian selection. -- 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
Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense. -- Richard Dawkins
I was confirmed at my prep school at the age of 13. -- 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
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
My computer is a very complex gadget and it was designed by many designers, so why must the universe have only a single designer and not many designers? -- Richard Dawkins
I don't want to sound callous. I mean, even if I have nothing to offer, that doesn't matter, because that still doesn't mean that what anybody else has to offer therefore has to be true. -- Richard Dawkins
The American biblical scholar Bart Ehrman, in a book whose subtitle is The Story Behind Who Changed the New Testament and Why, unfolds the huge uncertainty befogging the New Testament texts. -- Richard Dawkins
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
Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don't know it. -- Richard Dawkins
Its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive him-self'. -- 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
Anybody who objects to cloning on principle has to answer to all the identical twins in the world who might be insulted by the thought that there is something offensive about their very existence. Clones are simply identical twins. -- Richard Dawkins
That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: 'the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation. -- Richard Dawkins
DNA is ROM. It can be read millions of times over, but only written to once - when it is first assembled the birth of the cell in which it resides. -- 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
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
There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over. -- Richard Dawkins
Let us understand Darwinism so we can walk in the opposite direction when it comes to setting up society. -- 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
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 is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions. -- Richard Dawkins
A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance -- 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 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
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
Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. -- Richard Dawkins
Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived. -- 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
I might respect you as a brilliant intellect, runner, musician or juggler. But respect your BELIEFS? Only if they're supported by evidence. -- 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
Most of us happily disavow fairies, astrology and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, without first immersing ourselves in books of Pastafarian theology etc. -- Richard Dawkins
My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer. -- Richard Dawkins
I've never heard of William Craig. A debate with him might look good on his resume, but it wouldn't look good on mine! -- 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
I am not sure what to make of my admittedly anecdotal observation that many of those who most ardently oppose the taking of embryonic life also seem to be more than usually enthusiastic about taking adult life. -- 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
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
The fact that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of something does not put existence and non-existence on an even footing. -- Richard Dawkins
I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further. -- Richard Dawkins
We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage. -- Richard Dawkins
It is a virtue to admit ignorance when you don't know, but not to wallow in ignorance as an end in itself.
People say if we don't believe god is watching over us, we abandon morality. Are they right? -- Richard Dawkins
I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist. -- Richard Dawkins
Segregated schools. Children are educated, again often from a very early age, with members of a religious in-group and seperately from children whose families adhere to other religions. -- Richard Dawkins
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
If we say that religion is a virus, then why isn't science a virus? -- 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
We should take astrology seriously. No, I don't mean we should believe in it. I am talking about fighting it seriously instead of humouring it as a piece of harmless fun. -- Richard Dawkins
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
A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural belief. In -- Richard Dawkins
Paul Davies's The Mind of God seems to hover somewhere between Einsteinian pantheism and an obscure form of deism - for -- Richard Dawkins
Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it. -- Richard Dawkins
Sometimes in life it is a good idea to stop,sometimes it is a good idea to go on. The trick is to decide when to stop -- Richard Dawkins
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time. -- Richard Dawkins
Beauty arises out of human inspiration. -- Richard Dawkins
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
What is illiberal is not persuasion but imposition of one's views. -- Richard Dawkins
I need to learn not to bend over backwards to be nice to faith-heads. Give these people an inch and they take a league. I think, as I did when I wrote The God Delusion, that the Roman Catholic Church is a disgusting institution, the second most evil religion in the world. -- Richard Dawkins
The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner. -- Richard Dawkins
I think by the age of about nine I recognized that there were a lot of different religions, and it was an accident I happened to be born into one of them. If I had been born somewhere else, I would have had a different one. Which is a pretty good lesson, actually. Everyone should learn that. -- Richard Dawkins
What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue? -- Richard Dawkins
I don't think faith is positive, because faith means belief without evidence, and you shouldn't believe anything without evidence. ["The Daily Show" 24 Sept 2013] -- 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
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 people think God is interesting, the onus is on them to show that there is anything there to talk about. Otherwise they should just shut up about it. -- Richard Dawkins
Our consciousness is also raised by the cruelty and wastefulness of natural selection. Predators seem beautifully 'designed' to catch prey animals, while the prey animals seem equally beautifully 'designed' to escape them. Whose side is God on? -- Richard Dawkins
I am not absolutely positive there is no god. Only in the sense that I'm not absolutely positive there is no large china teapot in orbit in the solar system. -- Richard Dawkins
I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one. -- Richard Dawkins
frequently recommend Miller's book, Finding Darwin's God, -- Richard Dawkins
The denouement is perhaps the most moving scene of her show Letting Go of God. -- Richard Dawkins
Jesus was a loyal Jew. It was Paul who invented the idea of taking the Jewish God to the Gentiles. Hartung puts it more bluntly than I dare: 'Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known that Paul would be taking his plan to the pigs.' Hartung -- Richard Dawkins
I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it. - ALBERT EINSTEIN -- Richard Dawkins
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
God is an idea that people believe in and I spend time arguing with people that subscribe to that idea(man made idea). -- Richard Dawkins
Either blasphemy is a victimless crime or its victim is powerful enough to take care of himself without any help from you. -- Richard Dawkins
Goodness is no part of the definition of the God Hypothesis, merely a desirable add-on. -- 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
I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there. -- Richard Dawkins
The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. -- Richard Dawkins
The idea that God could only forgive our sins by having his son tortured to death as a scapegoat is surely, from an objective point of view, a deeply unpleasant idea. If God wanted to forgive us our sins, why didn't he just forgive them? Why did he have to have his son tortured? -- Richard Dawkins
The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way. -- Richard Dawkins
Do we really need policing - whether by God or by each other - in order to stop us from behaving in a selfish and criminal manner? -- Richard Dawkins
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
If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself tortured and executed in payment - thereby, incidentally, condemning remote future generations of Jews to pogroms and persecution as 'Christ-killers': did that hereditary sin pass down in the semen too? -- 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
God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs. -- 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
I prefer to say that I believe in people, and people, when given the right encouragement to think for themselves about all the information now available, very often turn out not to believe in God and to lead fulfilled and satisfied - indeed, liberated - lives. -- Richard Dawkins
Einstein was adamant in rejecting all ideas of a personal god. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
Don't ask God to cure cancer and world poverty. He's too busy finding you a parking space and fixing the weather for your barbecue. -- Richard Dawkins
How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one. -- Richard Dawkins
We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude the He is very, very improbable indeed. -- Richard Dawkins
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
If I were God wanting to make a human being, I would do it by a more direct way rather than by evolution. Why deliberately set it up in the one way which makes it look as though you don't exist? -- Richard Dawkins
I don't understand why so many people who are sophisticated in science go on believing in God. I wish I did. -- Richard Dawkins
If you have Mozart to listen to, why would you need God? -- Richard Dawkins
We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
The evidence for evolution is so compelling that the only way to save the creation theory is to assume that God deliberately planted enormous quantities of evidence to make it look as if evolution had happened. -- Richard Dawkins
The truly adult view [ ... ] is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed. -- 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
If this dysfunctional family was the best Sodom had to offer by way of morals, some might begin to feel a certain sympathy with God and his judicial brimstone. -- Richard Dawkins
Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction). -- Richard Dawkins
Religious people are atheists about all other gods, atheists only take it one god further. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
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
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
God likes to have his free lunch and be it too. -- Richard Dawkins
labelling our ignorance "God". -- Richard Dawkins
If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in this exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you. -- 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. -- Richard Dawkins
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
Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution? -- Richard Dawkins
Everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god - from Ra to Shiva - in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in. -- Richard Dawkins
Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant. -- Richard Dawkins
[Science] works! Planes fly. Cars drive. Computers compute. If you base medicine on science, you cure people. If you base the design of planes on science, they fly. If you base the design of rockets on science, they reach the moon. It works ... bitches. -- Richard Dawkins
Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It's a sort of crime against childhood. -- Richard Dawkins
Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born -- 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
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
The thing that defines a species is that all members have the same addressing system for their DNA. -- 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
There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality -- Richard Dawkins
The Universe does not owe us meaning. -- Richard Dawkins
If something were to happen that went against our current understanding of reality, scientists would see that as a challenge to our present model, requiring us to abandon or at least change it. It is through such adjustments and subsequent testing that we approach closer and closer to what is true. -- 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
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
I will not utter falsehoods but I have no objection to making meaningless statements. -- Richard Dawkins
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
Being dead will be no different from being unborn
I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There is nothing to fear in that. -- Richard Dawkins
The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence ... The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held to us as worthy of imitation. -- Richard Dawkins
Faith is belief without evidence and reason; coincidentally that's also the definition of delusion. -- Richard Dawkins
Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution. -- Richard Dawkins
Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random. -- 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
Natural selection is anything but random. -- Richard Dawkins
We should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics. -- Richard Dawkins
What is remarkable is the polar opposition between the religiosity of the American public at large and the atheism of the intellectual elite.54 -- 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
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
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
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
I'm pretty sure there is some genetic component towards intelligence. -- Richard Dawkins
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
In the beginning was simplicity. -- Richard Dawkins
Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell? -- 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
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
they experience - what they see, hear, think, and -- 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
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
Adoption and contraception, like reading, mathematics, and stress-induced illness, are products of an animal that is living in an environment radically different from the one in which its genes were naturally selected. -- Richard Dawkins
[Alternative medicine is defined as] that set of practices that cannot be tested, refuse to be tested or consistently fail tests. -- Richard Dawkins
There is no intrinsic tendency in gene pools for particular genes to increase or decrease in frequency. But when there is a systematic increase or decrease in the frequency with which we see a particular gene in a gene pool, that is precisely and exactly what we mean by evolution. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
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
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
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
I didn't have a very starry school career, I was medium to above average, nothing special. -- Richard Dawkins
There are more cells in your brain than there are brains in your entire body. -- Richard Dawkins
Offense is what people take when they can't take argument. -- 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
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
Evolution normally does not come to a halt, but constantly 'tracks' the changing environment. -- Richard Dawkins
A triumph of consciousness-raising has been the homosexual hijacking of the word 'gay.' -- Richard Dawkins
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
What is the colour of abstraction? What is the smell of hope? -- Richard Dawkins
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
I am passionate about the truth. Passion is very different from fundamentalism. -- Richard Dawkins
Although many of us fear death, I think there is something illogical about it. -- 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
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
It is universally accepted that an admission of atheism would be instant political suicide for any (U.S.) presidential candidate. -- Richard Dawkins
Bad things, like good things don't happen any more often than they ought to by chance. the universe has no mind, no feelings, and no personality, so it doesn't do things in order to either hurt or please you. bad things happen because things happen. -- Richard Dawkins
giving children something with which to surprise their parents is one of the greatest gifts a teacher can bestow. -- Richard Dawkins
Religious organisations have an automatic tax-free charitable status. -- Richard Dawkins
Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives. -- Richard Dawkins
Perhaps, then, the words male and female have no general meaning. -- 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
Evolution has been observed. It's just that it hasn't been observed while it's happening. -- Richard Dawkins
Religion has at one time or another been thought to fill four main roles in human life: explanation, exhortation, consolation and inspiration. -- Richard Dawkins
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
Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture, rightly observed. -- Richard Dawkins
We needn't bother with exactly what 'electric charge' means here. -- Richard Dawkins
If circumcision has any justification AT ALL, it should be medical only. Parents' religion is the worst of all reasons - pure child abuse. -- Richard Dawkins
Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur'an. You don't have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about Nazism. -- Richard Dawkins
Creative intelligences, being evolved arrived late in the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. -- Richard Dawkins
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
If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result. -- Richard Dawkins
Smolin's idea, expounded in The Life of the Cosmos, hinges -- Richard Dawkins
The universe doesn't owe you a sense of hope -- Richard Dawkins
Though the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth consuming, hostility provoking rituals, the anti-factual, counter-productive fantasies of religion. -- Richard Dawkins
If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: 'Have they discovered evolution yet? -- 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
The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal. -- Richard Dawkins
THE MAJORITY of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all -- Richard Dawkins
Undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance. -- Richard Dawkins
The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, nor an eight-level code as in some telephone systems, but a quaternary code with four symbols. The machine code of the genes is uncannily computerlike. -- Richard Dawkins
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. -- Richard Dawkins
A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence. -- Richard Dawkins
As Mark Twain cuttingly remarked, if you removed all occurrences of the phrase 'And it came to pass', the Book of Mormon would be reduced to a pamphlet. -- Richard Dawkins
The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially, the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer. -- Richard Dawkins
Here are some dates at which women were granted the vote: New Zealand 1893 Australia 1902 Finland 1906 Norway 1913 United States 1920 Britain 1928 France 1945 Belgium 1946 Switzerland 1971 Kuwait 2006 -- Richard Dawkins
The very idea of supernatural magic - including miracles - is incoherent, devoid of sensible meaning. -- Richard Dawkins
The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale. -- Richard Dawkins
More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding. -- 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
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
The fear of Hell is a very powerful motivation. -- 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
What makes my jaw drop is that people today should base their lives on such an appalling role model as Yahweh - and, even worse, that they should bossily try to force the same evil monster (whether fact or fiction) on the rest of us. -- Richard Dawkins
He has no theistic beliefs, but shares the poetic naturalism that the cosmos provokes in -- Richard Dawkins
Religion is the root of quite a lot of evil. -- Richard Dawkins
If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature. -- Richard Dawkins
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
Rather than propose a new theory or unearth a new fact, often the most important contribution a scientist can make is to discover a new way of seeing old theories or facts. -- Richard Dawkins
Having a debate with a modern Christian is like punching a sponge. -- Richard Dawkins
Teachers who help to open young minds perform a duty which is as near sacred as I will admit. -- Richard Dawkins
During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world. -- Richard Dawkins
Gravity is not a version of the truth. It is the truth. Anyone who doubts it is invited to jump out a tenth-storey window. -- Richard Dawkins
I am passionate about truth and passionate about clarity, and I don't regard myself as particularly militant or aggressive. I simply wish to discuss what is true and to listen to evidence and put evidence forward to other people and have a sensible, sane, moderated argument. -- Richard Dawkins
The genes are master programmers, and they are programming for their lives. -- Richard Dawkins
Society bends over backward to be accommodating to religious sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities. If I say something offensive to religious people, I'll be universally censured, including by many atheists. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
I guess there are some rights of parents with what they choose their children to learn, but I'm biased in favor of freeing children to learn and not letting parents be too doctrinaire in indoctrinating their children. -- 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
Religions do make claims about the universe
the same kinds of claims that scientists make, except they're usually false. -- Richard Dawkins
We are digital archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas; walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsated by the wonder of it. -- 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
What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a 'spark of life.' It is information, words, instructions ... If you want to understand life, don't think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology. -- 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
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
Beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture, they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution. -- Richard Dawkins
Public sharing is an important part of science. -- Richard Dawkins
Nature is a miserly accountant, grudging the pennies, watching the clock, punishing the smallest extravagance. -- Richard Dawkins
All religious beliefs seem weird to people not brought up in them. -- Richard Dawkins
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. - RALPH WALDO EMERSON -- Richard Dawkins
The less you think, the more you believe. -- 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
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
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
The best scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried -- Richard Dawkins
Indeed, to claim a supernatural explanation of something is not to explain it at all and, even worse, to rule out any possibility of its ever being explained. -- Richard Dawkins
Don't kid yourself that you're going to live again after you're dead; you're not. Make the most of the one life you've got. Live it to the full. -- Richard Dawkins
My best guess is that my garbled allusion to Ezra Pound in the following must have come from my parents' reading aloud. The Askari fell off the ostrich In the rain Huge sing Goddamn And what became of the ostrich? Huge sing Goddamn -- Richard Dawkins
Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. -- Richard Dawkins
We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe. -- Richard Dawkins
[Invading Iraq] will unite the entire Arab world against the West. -- Richard Dawkins
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
As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, 'Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or 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. -- Richard Dawkins
Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence. -- Richard Dawkins
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
Chance" is just a word expressing ignorance -- Richard Dawkins
Organizing atheists is a bit like herding cats; They are on the whole too intelligent and independent minded to lend themselves to being herded. -- 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
To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. -- Richard Dawkins
All the fossils that we have ever found have always been found in the appropriate place in the time sequence. There are no fossils in the wrong place. -- Richard Dawkins
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
To an honest judge, the alleged marriage between religion and science is a shallow, empty, spin-doctored sham. -- Richard Dawkins
To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham. -- 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
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
For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria. -- 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
Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything. -- 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
Segregation has no place in the education system. -- Richard Dawkins
Whenever a controversy arises over sexual or reproductive morals, you can bet that religious leaders from several different faith groups will be prominently represented on influential committees, or on panel discussions on radio or television. -- Richard Dawkins
Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven. -- Richard Dawkins
Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
The usefulness of science is sometimes exaggerated. You'd never talk about music being useful or art being useful. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden. -- Richard Dawkins
Islands are natural workshops of evolution. -- Richard Dawkins
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. -- Richard Dawkins
Religious faith has something of the same character as falling in love (and both have many of the attributes of being high on an addictive drug* -- Richard Dawkins
It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests. -- Richard Dawkins
A universe with a creator would be a totally different kind of universe, scientifically speaking, than one without. -- Richard Dawkins
Anthropologically informed works, from Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough to Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained or Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust, fascinatingly document the bizarre phenomenology of superstition and ritual. Read such books and marvel at the richness of human gullibility. But that is not -- Richard Dawkins
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
The higher one's intelligence or education level, the less one is likely to be religious or hold "beliefs" of any kind. -- Richard Dawkins
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
A male on
the other hand can never get enough copulations with as many
different females as possible: the word excess has no meaning for a
male -- 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
Bishops sit in the House of Lords automatically. -- Richard Dawkins
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
Why are we so obsessed with monogamous fidelity? -- Richard Dawkins
Once again, I am sorry to take a sledgehammer to so small and fragile a nut, but I have to do so because more than 40 per cent of the American people believe literally in the story of Noah's Ark. -- Richard Dawkins
The book is true, and if evidence seems to condtradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out not the book. -- 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
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
When we talk about genes for anything, like a gene for being gay or a gene for being aggressive or something of that sort, that a gene for anything may not have been a gene for that thing under different environmental conditions. -- Richard Dawkins
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
I should also give some space to Amotz Zahavi's idea that altruistic donation might be a 'Potlatch' style of dominance signal: see how superior to you I am, I can afford to make a donation to you! -- Richard Dawkins
Aquarius is a miscellaneous set of stars all at different distances from us, which have no connection with each other except that they constitute a (meaningless) pattern when seen from a certain (not particularly special) place in the galaxy (here). -- Richard Dawkins
Evil is a miscellaneous collection of nasty things that nasty people do. -- Richard Dawkins
We have all been guilty of bending over backwards to be nice to an unworthy but powerful opponent, -- Richard Dawkins
There's a mystical strain in every country, and eclipses are likely to bring that out. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content. -- Richard Dawkins
The illusion of design is so successful that to this day most Americans (including, significantly, many influential and rich Americans) stubbornly refuse to believe it is an illusion. -- 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
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
If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. -- Richard Dawkins
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
Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality that would not imply that the theory of evolution was false. -- Richard Dawkins
[If] there is mercy in nature, it is accidental. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent. -- 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
To invoke 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
Perhaps Islam is analogous to a carnivorous gene complex, Buddhism to a herbivorous one. -- Richard Dawkins
David Deutsch, in The Fabric of Reality, embraces the 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum theory, -- 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
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
My thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings are all in my brain. My brain is going to rot. -- 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
It has been convincingly demonstrated that countries where there are high rates of poverty, or high rates of economic inequality, are the countries with the highest rates of religious beliefs. -- Richard Dawkins
I don't care about what is good and what is evil, I care about what is true. -- Richard Dawkins
The Darwinian theory is in principle capable of explaining life. No other theory that has ever been suggested is in principle capable of explaining life. -- Richard Dawkins
As J. B. S. Haldane said when asked what evidence might contradict evolution, 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian. -- Richard Dawkins
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
It is an absurd law [Section 295A of the Indian penal code] but also extremely dangerous because it gives fanatics, whether they are Hindus, Catholics or Muslims, a licence to be offended. It also allows people who are in dispute with you to make up false accusations of blasphemy. -- Richard Dawkins
Religion is nothing more than a useless and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident. Religious behavior may be a misfiring, an unfortunate byproduct of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful. -- 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
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
The paradox has often been noted that the United States, founded in secularism, is now the most religiose country in Christendom, while England, with an established church headed by its constitutional monarch, is among the least. -- Richard Dawkins
What are all of us but self-reproducing robots? We have been put together by our genes and what we do is roam the world looking for a way to sustain ourselves and ultimately produce another robot child. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drfiting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene panting far behind. -- Richard Dawkins
I am not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where facts are concerned. -- Richard Dawkins
I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca-or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of Kyoto or, of course, the Buddhas of Bamiyan. -- Richard Dawkins
To hell with you, Buddy. No policeman wants to protect a goddamned atheist. I hope somebody bloodies you up good. -- Richard Dawkins
The river of my title is a river of DNA, a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues -- 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
Without gradualness ... we are back to a miracle. -- 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
We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational. -- Richard Dawkins
Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense. -- Richard Dawkins
Atheists are the new gays; in the closet and pretty much disqualified from public office. -- Richard Dawkins
The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened -- Richard Dawkins
Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins. -- Richard Dawkins
I'm not much given to straight, irony-free hero-worship. -- Richard Dawkins
As for the next nearest star, Proxima Centauri, if you look at it in 2012, what you are seeing is happening in 2008. -- 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 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
It's very important to try to inculcate into children moral rules, such as "do as you would be done by." -- Richard Dawkins
I think I would abolish schools which systematically inculcate sectarian beliefs. -- Richard Dawkins
You can't get away with saying, 'If you try to stop me from insulting homosexuals it violates my freedom of prejudice.' But you can get away with saying, 'It violates my freedom of religion.' What, when you think about it, is the difference? Yet again, religion trumps all. -- Richard Dawkins
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
I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. -- Richard Dawkins
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
I'm a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims. -- Richard Dawkins
The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it. -- Richard Dawkins
Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. -- Richard Dawkins
I am not trying to make a point by telling stories. Chosen examples are never serious evidence for any worthwhile generalization. -- 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
There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out. -- Richard Dawkins
It is a commonplace that good historians don't judge statements from past times by the standards of their own. -- Richard Dawkins
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
All animals are minor variations on a very particular theme. -- Richard Dawkins
Anyone can popularize science if he oversimplifies. -- 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
I don't know what to think about magic and fairy tales. -- Richard Dawkins
Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence. -- 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 same glucose ration was scrupulously administered to all the flasks equally. -- Richard Dawkins
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
I get the feeling more and more that religion is being left behind. -- Richard Dawkins
The whole idea of creating saints, it's pure 'Monty Python.' They have to clock up two miracles. -- Richard Dawkins
[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
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
'What is the purpose of the universe?' is a silly question. -- Richard Dawkins
People believe the only alternative to randomness is intelligent design. -- Richard Dawkins
The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling - though not to me. -- Richard Dawkins
If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine. -- 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
The fact that somebody does good doesn't make their beliefs true. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
Our subjective judgment of what seems like a good bet is irrelevant to what is actually a good bet. -- Richard Dawkins
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
At the opposite end of the spectrum from pacifism, we have a pusillanimous reluctance to use religious names for warring factions. In Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants are euphemized to 'Nationalists' and 'Loyalists' respectively. -- 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 there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
I think we certainly benefit from social institutions which encourage us towards moral behavior. It's very important to have law. It's very important to have a moral education. -- Richard Dawkins
The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something. -- Richard Dawkins
Braininess is attractive -- Richard Dawkins
Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complex that it must include a model of itself. -- Richard Dawkins
Reductionism is a dirty word, and a kind of 'holistier than thou' self-righteousness has become fashionable. -- Richard Dawkins
No sane creator, setting out from scratch to design a flat-fish, would have conceived on his drawing board the absurd distortion of the head needed to bring both eyes round to one side. -- Richard Dawkins
You cannot be both sane and well educated and disbelieve in evolution. The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person has got to believe in evolution. -- Richard Dawkins
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
I think the world's always a better place if people are filled with understanding. -- 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
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
Each one of us is a city of cells, and each cell a town of bacteria. You are a gigantic megalopolis of bacteria. -- 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
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
I've always been very suspicious of the left-right dimension in politics. -- Richard Dawkins
You don't believe that the Earth is round only if you're an astronaut. You don't believe Napoleon existed only if you're a historian. You believe these things because they're facts, proved by evidence. -- Richard Dawkins
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
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. -- Richard Dawkins
The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans. -- 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
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
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
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
Cloning may be good and it may be bad. Probably it's a bit of both. The question must not be greeted with reflex hysteria but decided quietly, soberly and on its own merits. We need less emotion and more thought. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
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
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
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
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
Of course they don't function as gills, but five-week human embryos can be regarded as little pink fishes, with gills. -- Richard Dawkins
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
But, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive. -- Richard Dawkins
It will explore the consequences of the evolution theory for a particular issue. My purpose is to examine the biology of selfishness and altruism. Apart -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment. -- 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
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
A good scientific theory is one which is falsifiable, which has not been falsified. -- Richard Dawkins
It is interesting to wonder whether taxonomists of the future may regret the way our generation messed around with genomes. -- Richard Dawkins
Our mental burka window is narrow because it didn't need to be any wider in order to assist our ancestors to survive. -- 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
There is the particular additional benefit of conspicuous generosity as a way of buying unfakeably authentic advertising. -- Richard Dawkins
I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene. -- Richard Dawkins
It's a difficult business, finding out what's true about the world, the universe. -- Richard Dawkins
Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
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
There are no natural borderlines in evolution. The illusion of a borderline is created by the fact that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct. -- Richard Dawkins
People like to trace their ancestry. -- Richard Dawkins
Non-existent male? I suppose that, in the ditzily -- Richard Dawkins
I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will. -- Richard Dawkins
Natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being. -- Richard Dawkins
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
Evolution is not a genetically controlled distortion of one adult form into another; it is a genetically controlled alteration in a developmental program. -- 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
Some people find clarity threatening. They like muddle, confusion, obscurity. So when somebody does no more than speak clearly it sounds threatening. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine. -- Richard Dawkins
The Bishop goes on to the human eye, asking rhetorically, and with the implication that there is no answer, 'How could an organ so complex evolve?' This is not an argument, it is simply an affirmation of incredulity. -- 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
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
A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet -- Richard Dawkins
You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells. -- Richard Dawkins
We're going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. -- 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
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
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 have a huge amount of DNA in common with jellyfish. -- 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
Effective searching procedures become, when the search-space is sufficiently large, indistinguishable from true creativity. -- Richard Dawkins
I sympathize with politicians who have to watch every syllable they utter for fear it will be misused by somebody with an agenda. -- Richard Dawkins
It is a remarkable coincidence that almost everyone has the same religion as their parents and it always just so happens they're the right religion. -- 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
Atheism is not a religion. Abstinence is not a sex position. -- Richard Dawkins
The universe doesn't owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn't owe us a nice warm feeling inside. -- 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
I mean it as a compliment when I say that you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for an answer. -- Richard Dawkins
Evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion. -- 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
I shall not make an argument ad hominem. My argument is ad bullshitem. -- Richard Dawkins
Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit. -- Richard Dawkins
Regarding the accusations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are, they are not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child Catholic in the first place. -- Richard Dawkins
Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things. -- Richard Dawkins
The purpose of a lecture should not be to impart information. There are books, libraries, nowadays the internet, for that. A lecture should inspire and provoke thought. -- Richard Dawkins
The feminists taught us about consciousness-raising. -- Richard Dawkins
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
It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that if Darwinism was really a theory of chance, it could not work. -- Richard Dawkins
There is an attitude in the culture that says that everybody is entitled to their opinion. You got to respect their opinion. No, you damn well haven't got to respect their opinion. -- 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
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
But perhaps life has a tendency to converge on a pathway, something like a magnetic pull that draws it back despite temporary deviations. -- Richard Dawkins
We should always be open-minded, but the only good reason to believe that something exists is if there is real evidence that it does. -- Richard Dawkins
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
We have to find our own purposes in life, which are not derived directly from our scientific history. -- 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
The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. -- Richard Dawkins
I am thrilled to be alive at time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits. -- 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
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
Religious faith, is a state of mind, that leads people to believe in something, it doesn't matter what, without a whisper of doubt, or a whiff of evidence, and believe so strongly in some cases, that they are prepare to kill and die for it, without the need for further justification. -- Richard Dawkins
Science is the poetry of reality. -- Richard Dawkins
I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history. -- Richard Dawkins
History is usually a random, messy affair', -- Richard Dawkins
But if science cannot answer some ultimate question, what makes anybody think that religion can? -- Richard Dawkins
If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity. -- Richard Dawkins
Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you. -- Richard Dawkins
We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them 'religious'; otherwise, they are likely to be called 'mad', 'psychotic' or 'delusional' . . . Clearly there is sanity in numbers. -- Richard Dawkins
What you cannot have is a gene that sacrifices itself for the benefit of other genes. What you can have is a gene that makes organisms sacrifice themselves for other organisms under the influence of selfish genes. -- Richard Dawkins
There is no universally agreed definition of a gene. -- 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
Relatives share a substantial proportion of their genes. Each selfish gene therefore has its loyalties divided between different bodies. -- Richard Dawkins
We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.* 12 -- Richard Dawkins
The gene is the basic unit of selfishness. -- Richard Dawkins
One gene may be regarded as a unit that survives through a large number of successive individual bodies. -- Richard Dawkins
It requires a deliberate mental effort to turn biology the right way up again, and remind ourselves that the replicators come first, in importance as well as in history. -- Richard Dawkins
What really happens is that the gene pool becomes filled with genes that influence bodies in such a way that they behave 'as if' they made complex, if unconscious, cost/benefit calculations -- Richard Dawkins
Science - or the products of science like technology - is just a way of achieving something real, something that happens, something that works. -- Richard Dawkins
I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true. -- Richard Dawkins
The Bible may be an arresting and
poetic work of fiction, but it is not the sort of book you should give
your children to form their morals. -- Richard Dawkins
Publishers like a good buzz, and negative responses sell books just as well as positive ones. -- 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
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
Science is but one form of rationalism, while religion is the most common form of superstition. -- 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
Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose. -- 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
In true natural selection, if a body has what it takes to survive, its genes automatically survive because they are inside it. So the genes that survive tend to be, automatically, those genes that confer on bodies the qualities that assist them to survive. -- Richard Dawkins
Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated social evolution. -- 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
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
Selfish genes actually explain altruistic individuals, and to me that's crystal-clear. -- Richard Dawkins
Martin Rees, in Just Six Numbers, lists six fundamental constants, which are believed to hold all around the universe. -- Richard Dawkins
I personally would consider it to be an honour to be fossilized. -- Richard Dawkins
All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation. -- 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
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
It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that). -- Richard Dawkins
Along with William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin is Britain's greatest gift to the world. He was our greatest thinker. -- Richard Dawkins
This person should have been aborted years ago. -- Richard Dawkins
We humans give ourselves such airs, even aggrandizing our poky little 'sins' to the level of cosmic significance! -- Richard Dawkins
Shouldn't children be taught critical, sceptical thinking from an early age? Shouldn't we all be taught to doubt, to weigh up plausibility, to demand evidence? -- Richard Dawkins
Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it. -- Richard Dawkins
To an evolutionary psychologist, the universal extravagance of religious rituals, with their costs in time, resources, pain and privation, should suggest as vividly as a mandrills bottom that religion may be adaptive. - MAREK KOHN -- Richard Dawkins
Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. 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
The very idea that grand conclusions could follow from such logomachist trickery offends me aesthetically, so I must take care to refrain from bandying words like 'fool'. -- 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
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 body is a survival machine programmed to propagate the genes that reside inside it. -- 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
You can't statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you're still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
Commonsense lets us down, because commonsense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large; the mundane world of the familiar. -- Richard Dawkins
Words are our servants, not our masters. -- Richard Dawkins
A professorship of theology should have no place in our institution. - THOMAS JEFFERSON -- Richard Dawkins
The fact that we slowly apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discover it, should not subtract from its wonder. -- Richard Dawkins
If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have to
look. -- Richard Dawkins
Those people who leap from personal bafflement at a natural phenomenon straight to a hasty invocation of the supernatural are no better than the fools who see a conjuror bending a spoon and leap to the conclusion that it is 'paranormal'. -- 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
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
Science is the disinterested search for the objective truth about the material world. -- Richard Dawkins
By dislaiming the idea of a next life, we can take more excitement in this one! -- 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
The child has no way of knowing what's good information. -- Richard Dawkins
There's no point of having faith if you have evidence. -- Richard Dawkins
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
It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too. -- Richard Dawkins
My passion is for scientific truth. I don't much care about good and evil. ... I care about what's true. -- Richard Dawkins
I can handle heckling on evolution because it's my own field. -- Richard Dawkins
The chicken is only an egg's way for making another egg. -- Richard Dawkins
I don't think that it's up to government to dictate what people should wear. -- Richard Dawkins
I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous ideas. -- Richard Dawkins
It is time to stop the mealy-mouthed euphemisms: 'Nationalists', 'Loyalists', 'Communities', 'Ethnic Groups', 'Cultures', 'Civilizations'. Religions is the word you need. Religions is the word you are struggling hypocritially to avoid. -- Richard Dawkins
I think what I'd really like to see would be a mass consciousness-raising movement so that we would all become vegetarian. -- Richard Dawkins
There's clearly a lot of Ludditism, and you see it in all the hysteria about every scientific story. -- 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
All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities -- Richard Dawkins
How can we know whether the course of a life would have been changed by some particular alteration in its early history? -- Richard Dawkins
Why are genetic determinants thought to be any more ineluctable, or blame-absolving, than 'environmental' ones? -- Richard Dawkins
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
It is raining DNA outside. -- Richard Dawkins
The most terrible wars of history, the two major wars of the century, have nothing to do with religions. -- Richard Dawkins
I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden -- Richard Dawkins
Zealand 1893 Australia -- Richard Dawkins
Professor Einstein, every Christian in America will immediately reply to you, 'Take your crazy, fallacious theory of evolution and go back to Germany where you came from, or stop trying to break down the faith of a people who gave you a welcome when you were forced to flee your native land.' The -- Richard Dawkins
Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not. -- Richard Dawkins
Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think that the Universe began after the domestication of the dog? -- Richard Dawkins
To say that something happened supernaturally is not just to say 'We don't understand it' but to say 'We will never understand it, so don't even try. -- Richard Dawkins
It's known that stress gives rise to disease. It's also known that many diseases, especially stress-related diseases, can be cured by placebos - pills that have no medicinal effect, but people think they do, and so they do. -- Richard Dawkins
I should have been put down at birth. -- Richard Dawkins
It is all too easy to mistake passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will. -- Richard Dawkins
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means. -- Richard Dawkins
Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once. -- 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
It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise. -- Richard Dawkins
A mischievous biologist might wonder whether some other physicists are in need of Darwinian consciousness-raising. -- Richard Dawkins
The American comedian Cathy Ladman observes that 'All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays. -- Richard Dawkins
American political opportunities are loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest. -- Richard Dawkins
Philosophy and the subjects known as 'humanities' are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived. -- Richard Dawkins
We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here. -- Richard Dawkins
Science cannot even make probability judgements on -- Richard Dawkins
Words are not trivial. They matter because they raise consciousness. -- Richard Dawkins
Religion is a distraction from true education. -- Richard Dawkins
The whole purpose of our search for a 'unit of selection' is to discover a suitable actor to play the leading role in our metaphors of purpose. -- Richard Dawkins
Don't squander precious ignorance by researching it away. -- Richard Dawkins
You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered. -- Richard Dawkins
I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women. -- Richard Dawkins
It was harder to work out that there was a question than to think of the answer. -- Richard Dawkins
we're apt to forget that symmetry is not an obvious quality that every creature must have. -- Richard Dawkins
You can never be absolutely certain that anything doesn't exist. But you can show that it's unlikely. -- Richard Dawkins
Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime. -- Richard Dawkins
Constructing models is something the human brain is very good at. When we are asleep it is called dreaming; when we are awake we call it imagination or, when it is exceptionally vivid, hallucination. -- Richard Dawkins
In the case of living machinery, the 'designer' is unconscious natural selection, the blind watchmaker. -- Richard Dawkins
The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics. -- Richard Dawkins
Why don't religious people talk like that when in the presence of the dying? -- Richard Dawkins
Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility. -- Richard Dawkins
Should we then not expect lions to refrain from killing antelopes, 'for the good of the mammals'? -- 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
You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being ... Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues. -- Richard Dawkins
I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition. -- Richard Dawkins
Religion . . . has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? - because you're not! -- Richard Dawkins
Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations. -- 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 think the probability of a supernatural creator existing is very very low, -- Richard Dawkins
Many religious people find it hard to imagine how, without religion, one can be good, or would even want to be good. -- Richard Dawkins
The anthropologist Helen Fisher, in Why We Love, has beautifully expressed the insanity of romantic love, and how over-the-top it is compared with what might seem strictly necessary. -- Richard Dawkins
Religion is the most inflammatory enemy-labelling device in history. -- Richard Dawkins
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
There is great variation in brain power all the way from Einstien on one hand to Sarah Palin on the other. -- Richard Dawkins
Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators -- Richard Dawkins
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
The Bible was written by fallible human beings. -- Richard Dawkins
There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion. -- Richard Dawkins
There are many very educated people who are religious, but they're not creationists. -- 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
But, alas, nobody anticipated the United States Department of Homeland Security. -- Richard Dawkins
People say I'm shrill and strident. -- Richard Dawkins
Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun. -- Richard Dawkins
I'm not a good observer. I'm not proud of it. -- Richard Dawkins
Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops. -- Richard Dawkins
Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end. -- Richard Dawkins
Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them. [ ... ] Since a principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis. -- Richard Dawkins
I mean, in a way, I feel that one of the reasons for learning about Darwinian evolution is as an object lesson in how not to set up our values and social lives. -- Richard Dawkins
Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory, we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories. -- Richard Dawkins
I am baffled by the way sophisticated theologians who know Adam and Eve never existed still keep talking about it. -- Richard Dawkins
Evolution is just a theory? Well, so is gravity and I don't see you jumping out of buildings. -- Richard Dawkins
I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion. -- 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
Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way. -- Richard Dawkins
Discrimination is not liberal. Arguing against discrimination is not intolerance. -- Richard Dawkins
Matter flows from place to place, and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing; I find the reality thrilling. -- Richard Dawkins
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
How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'? -- Richard Dawkins
When brains get sufficiently big, presumably, as human brains have, consciousness seems to emerge. -- Richard Dawkins
Labelling of children. Children are described as 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' etc. from an early age, and certainly far too early for them to have made up their own minds on what they think about religion. -- Richard Dawkins
although evolution may seem, in some vague sense, a 'good thing', especially since we are the product of it, nothing actually 'wants' to evolve. Evolution -- Richard Dawkins
It comes from natural selection: the process which, as far as we know, is the only process ultimately capable of generating complexity out of simplicity. -- 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
The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America. -- Richard Dawkins
'Take offense at the drop of a hat' is the unwritten eleventh commandment. -- Richard Dawkins
Evolution never looks to the future. -- Richard Dawkins
My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side. -- Richard Dawkins
Our brains are separate and independent enough from our genes to rebel against them.. we do so in a small way everytime we use contraception. There is no reason why we should not rebel in a large way too. -- Richard Dawkins
I am utterly fed up with the respect we have been brainwashed into bestowing upon religion. -- 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
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
Two religions cannot both be right, because they contradict each other, yet they can both be wrong. -- Richard Dawkins
We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. -- Richard Dawkins
I love romantic poetry. -- 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
We have the power to turn against our creators. -- Richard Dawkins
We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes. -- Richard Dawkins
That is to say that a positive number is the product of zero and infinity. -- 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
consciousness-raising. -- Richard Dawkins
Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether they are 'valid,' let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so. -- Richard Dawkins
Myths are fun, as long as you don't confuse them with the truth. -- 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 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
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
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
I have begun several projects which were never completed, not necessarily because they failed, but because I got interested in other things. -- Richard Dawkins
Dan Nilsson even remarks of compound eyes that 'It is only a small exaggeration to say that evolution seems to be fighting a desperate battle to improve a basically disastrous design. -- Richard Dawkins
What shall it profit a male if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his immortal genes? -- Richard Dawkins
What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them. -- Richard Dawkins
Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: 'When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion. -- Richard Dawkins
The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle. -- Richard Dawkins
We are a very, very unusual species. -- Richard Dawkins
Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it. -- Richard Dawkins
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
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
DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. -- Richard Dawkins
There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another. -- Richard Dawkins
how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they ended up manufacturing people. -- Richard Dawkins
It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe -- Richard Dawkins
My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a "they" as opposed to a "we" can be identified at all.
-- Richard Dawkins
evolution is blind to the future -- Richard Dawkins
I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. -- 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
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
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. -- Richard Dawkins
Our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude of size and speed which our bodies operate at. We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms. -- Richard Dawkins
Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next. -- Richard Dawkins
I would like people to appreciate science in the same way they appreciate the arts. -- 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
Unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop being true. -- Richard Dawkins
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
The feature of living matter that most demands explanation is that it is almost unimaginably complicated in directions that convey a powerful illusion of deliberate design. -- Richard Dawkins
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry. -- 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
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
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
Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past. -- Richard Dawkins
If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it. -- Richard Dawkins
There is something cheap about magic that works just because it is magic. -- Richard Dawkins
My decision to be a scientist was a bit of a drift really, more or less by default. -- Richard Dawkins
Pat Robertson would be harmless comedy, were he less typical of those who today hold power and influence in the United States. -- Richard Dawkins