Richard Dawkins Quotes

The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it - language, art, science - seemed to have evolved only once. The eye, by contrast, independently evolved 40 times. So, if you were to 'replay' evolution, the eye would almost certainly appear again, whereas the big brain probably wouldn't.

~ 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

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

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

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

~ 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

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

I'm pretty sure there is some genetic component towards intelligence.

~ 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

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

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.

~ 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

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 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

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

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

~ 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

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

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

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

~ 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

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

~ 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

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

People believe the only alternative to randomness is intelligent design.

~ 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

Beauty arises out of human inspiration.

~ Richard Dawkins

All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation.

~ 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

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

~ Richard Dawkins

I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine.

~ Richard Dawkins

I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true.

~ Richard Dawkins