Richard Dawkins Quotes

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

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

People believe the only alternative to randomness is intelligent design.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Dawkins

Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.

Richard Dawkins

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

Richard Dawkins

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

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

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

Richard Dawkins

To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.

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

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

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

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

Isn'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?

Richard Dawkins

Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium.

Richard Dawkins

It is possible in medicine, even when you intend to do good, to do harm instead. That is why science thrives on actively encouraging criticism rather than stifling it.

Richard Dawkins

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.

Richard Dawkins

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

Richard Dawkins

Even if you believe a creator god invented the laws of physics, would you so insult him as to suggest that he might capriciously and arbitrarily violate them in order to walk on water, or turn water into wine as a cheap party trick at a wedding?

Richard Dawkins

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

Richard Dawkins