Richard Dawkins Quotes

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. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

~ Richard Dawkins

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.

~ 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

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

...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

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

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

~ Richard Dawkins

Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though.

~ Richard Dawkins

So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

~ 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

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

~ Richard Dawkins

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. . . . The truly adult view, by contrast, 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

When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.

~ Richard Dawkins

Science is the poetry of reality.

~ 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

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

~ Richard Dawkins

A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.

~ Richard Dawkins

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

~ 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

To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries

~ 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

The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

~ Richard Dawkins

The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion mixes explosively with (and gives strong sanction to) both. Only the willfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today. Without a doubt it is the prime aggravator of the Middle East. Those of us who have for years politely concealed our contempt for the dangerous collective delusion of religion need to stand up and speak out. Things are different now. ‘All is changed, changed utterly.

~ Richard Dawkins

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

~ Richard Dawkins

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

~ 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

My main reason for scepticism about the Huxley/Sagan theory is that the human brain is demonstrably eager to see faces in random patterns, as we know from scientific evidence, on top of the numerous legends about faces of Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or Mother Teresa, being seen on slices of toast, or pizzas, or patches of damp on a wall. This eagerness is enhanced if the pattern departs from randomness in the specific direction of being symmetrical.

~ Richard Dawkins

Рассмотрим представление о Боге. Мы не знаем, как оно возникло в мимофонде. Возможно, оно возникало многократно путем независимых «мутаций». Во всяком случае это очень старая идея. Как она реплицируется? С помощью устного и письменного слова, подкрепляемого великой музыкой и изобразительным искусством. Почему эта идея обладает такой высокой выживаемостью? Напомним, что в данном случае «выживаемость» означает не выживание гена в генофонде, а выживание мима в мимофонде. На самом деле вопрос состоит в следующем: в чем та «особость» идеи о Боге, которая придает ей такую стабильность и способность проникать в культурную среду? Выживаемость хорошего мима, входящего в мимофонд, обусловливается его большой психологической привлекательностью. Идея Бога дает на первый взгляд приемлемый ответ на глубокие и волнующие вопросы о смысле существования. Она позволяет надеяться, что несправедливость на этом свете может быть вознаграждена на том свете. «Всегда протянутые руки», готовые поддержать нас в минуты нашей слабости, которые, подобно плацебо, отнюдь не теряют своей действенности, хотя и существуют лишь в нашем воображении. Вот некоторые из причин, по которым идея Бога с такой готовностью копируется последовательными поколениями индивидуальных мозгов. Бог существует, пусть лишь в форме мима с высокой выживаемостью или инфекционностью, в среде, создаваемой человеческой культурой.

~ Richard Dawkins

Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.

~ Richard Dawkins

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

~ 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

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

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

~ Richard Dawkins

It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

~ Richard Dawkins

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.

~ Richard Dawkins

It has become almost a cliché 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.

~ Richard Dawkins

DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

~ Richard Dawkins

We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

~ 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

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