Richard Dawkins Quotes

The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling - though not to me.

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.

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.

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)

Can omniscient God, who Knows the future, find The omnipotence to Change His future mind?

All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

The universe doesn't owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn't owe us a nice warm feeling inside.

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.

There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out.

The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.

...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.

Natural selection is anything but random.

In two senses: One is that you cannot go on the street and shout that you are an atheist, the other is that you are never given the intellectual framework for calling your faith into question.

Sometimes I think it's possible to mistake desire for clarity and talking in a no-nonsense way for aggression.

It's very important to try to inculcate into children moral rules, such as "do as you would be done by."

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.

Religious organisations have an automatic tax-free charitable status.

The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans.

I once wrote that anybody who believes the world is only 6,000 years old is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.

It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.

We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude the He is very, very improbable indeed.

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.

Human psychology has a near universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire.

Genome sequencing has changed taxonomy.

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

I find many of answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist.

You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.

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.

We are a very, very unusual species.

Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun.

Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it.

My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.

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.

I think we don't do a service to dialogue between science and faith to characterize sincere people by calling them names. That inspires an even more dug-in position.

Ideally, I'd like everybody to be secular.

I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden

[Jay] Gould sets up an artificial wall between the two worldviews that doesn't exist in my life.

It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests.

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

Religion is the most inflammatory enemy-labelling device in history.

The fact that somebody does good doesn't make their beliefs true.

I've always been antagonistic to any naïve application of the selfish gene theory to politics. Some people have attempted to suggest that it means we are selfish or we should be selfish.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

This person should have been aborted years ago.

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.

My decision to be a scientist was a bit of a drift really, more or less by default.