Richard Dawkins Quotes

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

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.

We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe.

Faith is belief without evidence and reason; coincidentally that's also the definition of delusion.

Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger - even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all - and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes.

I find that religion really does motivate people to do horrible things because they have this passionate faith in whatever their religion happens to be, and it teaches them that the other religion is the wrong one.

Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

DNA is ROM. It can be read millions of times over, but only written to once - when it is first assembled the birth of the cell in which it resides.

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

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.

I am utterly fed up with the respect we have been brainwashed into bestowing upon religion.

Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our Christian-inspired attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote can arouse more moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivasection of any number of intelligent adult chimpanzees! The only reason we can be comfortable with such a double standard is that the intermediates between humans and chimps are all dead.

Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think that the Universe began after the domestication of the dog?

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic.

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

Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science.

The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, nor an eight-level code as in some telephone systems, but a quaternary code with four symbols. The machine code of the genes is uncannily computerlike.

Next time that somebody tells you something is true, why not say to them: 'What kind of evidence is there for that?' And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.

If all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism, I would be the first to admit it, and I would immediately change my mind. As things stand, however, all available evidence (and there is a vast amount of it) favours evolution.

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.

Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.

Pope Francis seems to be a much nicer man than Pope Benedict, but I'm not sure that his views on things that really matter are all that different. Whereas Benedict was perhaps a wolf in wolf's clothing, Francis is perhaps a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Being dead will be no different from being unborn -- I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There is nothing to fear in that.

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.

We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance.

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

Isn't it a remarkable coincidence almost everyone has the same religion as their parents ? And it always just happens to be the right religion. Religions run in families. If we'd been brought up in ancient Greece we would all be worshiping Zeus and Apollo. If we had been born Vikings we would be worshiping Wotan and Thor. How does this come about ? Through childhood indoctrination.

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 species are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. 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.

Atheists are the new gays; in the closet and pretty much disqualified from public office.

I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem.

There is something so mysterious that it is almost like God. God is in the equations. God is in the fundamental constants. And that's fine. I mean, that's just redefinition of that which we find mysterious at the basis of the universe.

I do sometimes accuse people of ignorance, but that is not intended to be an insult. I'm ignorant of lots of things. Ignorance is something that can be remedied by education.

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else 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.

My last vestige of 'hands off religion' respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11, 2001, followed by the 'National Day of Prayer,' when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonations and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.

It is possible to enjoy the Mozart concerto without being able to play the clarinet. In fact, you can learn to be an expert connoisseur of music without being able to play a note on any instrument. Of course, music would come to a halt if nobody ever learned to play it. But if everybody grew up thinking that music was synonymous with playing it, think how relatively impoverished many lives would be. Couldn't we learn to think of science in the same way?

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.

Very close cousins like humans and chimps have almost all their genes in common. Slightly less close cousins like humans and monkeys still have recognizably the same genes. You could carry on right on down to humans and bacteria, and you will find continuous compelling evidence for the hierarchical tree of cousinship.

Let us understand Darwinism so we can walk in the opposite direction when it comes to setting up society.

The replicators that exist tend to be the ones that are good at manipulating the world to their own advantage. But other replicators are also successful otherwise they would not be common. The world therefore tends to become populated by mutually compatible sets of successful replicators, replicators that get on well together

With respect to those meanings of 'human' that are relevant to the morality of abortion, any fetus is less human than an adult pig.

What you cannot have is a gene that sacrifices itself for the benefit of other genes. What you can have is a gene that makes organisms sacrifice themselves for other organisms under the influence of selfish genes.

Nowadays theologians aren't quite so straightforward as Paley. They don't point to complex living mechanisms and say that they are self-evidently designed by a creator, just like a watch. But there is a tendency to point to them and say 'It is impossible to believe' that such complexity, or such perfection, could have evolved by natural selection. Whenever I read such a remark, I always feel like writing 'Speak for yourself' in the margin.

Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them. [...] Since a principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.

I don't shout people down. I argue people down, perhaps.

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

I am thrilled to be alive at time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.

American political opportunities are loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).