Richard Dawkins Quotes

I get the feeling more and more that religion is being left behind.

I'm sure Obama is an atheist, I'm sure Kennedy was an atheist, but I doubt if Pope Frank is.

I'm a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims.

Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins.

I sympathize with politicians who have to watch every syllable they utter for fear it will be misused by somebody with an agenda.

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

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.

There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists.

...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.

The resemblance of the signs of the zodiac to the animals after which they are named... is as unimpressive as the predictions of astrologers.

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.

It is universally accepted that an admission of atheism would be instant political suicide for any (U.S.) presidential candidate.

The thing that defines a species is that all members have the same addressing system for their DNA.

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.

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.

If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.

Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation.

I don't see that [Richard] Dawkins' basic account of evolution is incompatible with God's having designed it.

Do humans have a different moral significance than cows in general?

God's existence is either true or not. But calling it a scientific question implies that the tools of science can provide the answer.

Good and evil - I don't believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil.

I think there could be a very large number who are creationists by default. Those are the people I want to reach.

Professor Challenger, Conan Doyle's science hero, was a sort of irascible man constantly bellowing at people, so he was a little bit of a departure from both of those stereotypes.

I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction.

From my perspective, God cannot be completely contained within nature, and therefore God's existence is outside of science's ability to really weigh in.

God is the answer to all of those "How must it have come to be" questions.

My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else.

By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time.

They are either people of faith who have lost their faith from reading my books, or they are people who had already lost their faith, and something about my books encouraged them to affirm that.

Creationists are possibly gaining more political power. In the U.S., you are constantly hearing stories of school boards harassing teachers and trying to get textbooks banned.

If you are asking me if my more global purpose is a battle against religion, it is.

It is important not to confuse race and religion.

There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.

Ironically, I originally wrote the tweet with Jews and thought, That might give offense. And so I thought I better change it.

I think more than 20 percent of Nobel Prizes have been won by Jews.

Again, it is belief without evidence. In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science, because it was for the good of the Communist Party.

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.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

...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.

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.

Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferociousdefence? One might have supposed him amply capable of lookingafter himself.

Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration tomoral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually writtenin it?

What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them.

Science is interesting, and if you don't agree you can fuc

It is interesting to wonder whether taxonomists of the future may regret the way our generation messed around with genomes.

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.

One way to express the answer is that it might happen by 'chance'. But 'chance' is just a word expressing ignorance. It means 'determined by some as yet unknown, or unspecified, means'.

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

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.

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.