Richard Dawkins Quotes

The Bible may be an arresting andpoetic work of fiction, but it is not the sort of book you should giveyour children to form their morals.

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.

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.

Chance" is just a word expressing ignorance

Either blasphemy is a victimless crime or its victim is powerful enough to take care of himself without any help from you.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.

I am passionate about the truth. Passion is very different from fundamentalism.

Religion is a distraction from true education.

There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The best scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried

All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities

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.

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.

What shall it profit a male if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his immortal genes?

most of us happily disavow fairies, astrology and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, without first immersing ourselves in books of Pastafarian theology etc.

The fact that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of something does not put existence and non-existence on an even footing.

As J. B. S. Haldane said when asked what evidence might contradict evolution, 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.

[I]sn'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?

Discretion can be abused, and rulebooks are important safeguards against that. But the balance has shifted too far in the direction of an obsessive reverence for rules.

The habit of questioning authority is one of the most valuable gifts that a book, or a teacher, can give a young would-be scientist.

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.

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

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

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

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

Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.

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

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

People believe the only alternative to randomness is intelligent design.

Beauty arises out of human inspiration.

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.

Science - or the products of science like technology - is just a way of achieving something real, something that happens, something that works.