Top 155 Richard Dawkins Quotes

People like to trace their ancestry.

When the ancestors of the cheetah first began pursuing the ancestors of the gazelle, neither of them could run as fast as they can today.

My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.

I love romantic poetry.

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

If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it’s not supernatural.

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

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

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.

It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have.

For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator – the gene.

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

I think that people in the Bible Belt are far less monolithically religious than many people imagine. There are lots and lots of people who are free-thinking, secularists, or atheists in the so-called Bible Belt.

The whole idea of creating saints, it’s pure ‘Monty Python.’ They have to clock up two miracles.

Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

I’m afraid the Internet is filled with people using really very intemperate language.

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.

I once wrote that anybody who believes the world is only 6,000 years old is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.

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

Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.

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

The supernatural is ubiquitous in children’s entertainment, from Grimm and Hans Andersen to Disney and ‘Harry Potter.’

A constellation is not an entity at all, not the kind of thing that Uranus, or anything else, can sensibly be said to ‘move into.’

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.

I suppose I’m a cultural Anglican, and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green. I have a certain love for it.

As a liberal, I would hesitate to propose a blanket ban on any style of dress because of the implications for individual liberty and freedom of choice.

The central dogma of the New Testament is that Jesus died as a scapegoat for the sin of Adam and the sins that all we unborn generations might have been contemplating in the future. Adam’s sin is perhaps mitigated by the extenuating circumstance that he didn’t exist.

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

There’s a mystical strain in every country, and eclipses are likely to bring that out.

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

Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam.

Compassionate doctors sometimes lie to patients about the severity of their condition, and it is not always wrong to do so.

You can legally lie about the real world to your heart’s content, but until some human being is materially damaged, nobody will complain.

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.

The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the U.S. leads the world by miles.

Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it’s a time for reflection, a time for memory, a time for regret.

Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: It gives them something to do.

People believe the only alternative to randomness is intelligent design.

You can’t even begin to understand biology, you can’t understand life, unless you understand what it’s all there for, how it arose – and that means evolution.

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.

An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes – and as with memes in their original version.

My decision to be a scientist was a bit of a drift really, more or less by default.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition.

I don’t feel depressed. I feel elated.

God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs.

We should take astrology seriously. No, I don’t mean we should believe in it. I am talking about fighting it seriously instead of humouring it as a piece of harmless fun.

If there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection.

Public sharing is an important part of science.

Coming out as an atheist can cost an academic his or her job in some parts of America, and many choose to keep quiet about their atheism.

It’s an important point to realize that the genetic programming of our lives is not fully deterministic. It is statistical – it is in any animal merely statistical – not deterministic.

I think the world’s always a better place if people are filled with understanding.

All the fossils that we have ever found have always been found in the appropriate place in the time sequence. There are no fossils in the wrong place.

I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.

I think it’s misleading to use a word like ‘God’ in the way Einstein did. I’m sorry that Einstein did. I think he was asking for trouble, and he certainly was misunderstood.

There are many very educated people who are religious, but they’re not creationists.

There are risks in the sheer brevity of Twitter, and it’s actually quite an elegant art reducing what you have to say to 140 characters, and it’s something that I quite enjoy attempting to do.

The reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal world and moles live in an underground world and water striders live in a surface tension-dominated flatland, we live in a social world.

I’m not much given to straight, irony-free hero-worship.

Selfish genes actually explain altruistic individuals, and to me that’s crystal-clear.

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.

Islands are natural workshops of evolution.

The word ‘excess’ has no meaning for a male.

Humans have a proven track record in taking over planes by the use of threats, which work because the legitimate pilots value their own lives and those of their passengers.

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.

A good theory explains a lot but postulates little.

I was never much bothered about moral questions like, ‘How could there be a good God when there’s so much evil in the world?’

Many people want to send their children to faith schools because they get good exam results, but they’re not foolish enough to believe that it’s because of faith that they get good exam results.

Segregation has no place in the education system.

But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

Nothing is wrong with peace and love. It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ’s followers seem to disagree.

The very idea of supernatural magic – including miracles – is incoherent, devoid of sensible meaning.

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

People say I’m shrill and strident.

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

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.

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.

I love words.

I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s something for research.

Nico Tinbergen was my doctoral supervisor, and he was a benign, avuncular sort of influence; everybody loved him.

Why did humans lose their body hair? Why did they start walking on their hind legs? Why did they develop big brains? I think that the answer to all three questions is sexual selection.

I want very much to communicate science to as wide an audience as possible, but not at a cost of dumbing down, and not at a cost in getting things right.

Don’t kid yourself that you’re going to live again after you’re dead; you’re not. Make the most of the one life you’ve got. Live it to the full.

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.

Teachers who help to open young minds perform a duty which is as near sacred as I will admit.

Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It’s a sort of crime against childhood.

If you read Islamic creationist literature, it’s pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.

I don’t know what to think about magic and fairy tales.

I am baffled by the way sophisticated theologians who know Adam and Eve never existed still keep talking about it.

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.

The earliest books in the New Testament to be written were the Epistles, not the Gospels. It’s almost as though Saint Paul and others who wrote the Epistles weren’t that interested in whether Jesus was real.

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.

I can handle heckling on evolution because it’s my own field.

The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.

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.

In Britain, you don’t usually learn about evolution until you are about 15. I should have thought that you should start at about 8. But I could be wrong about that.

Either Jesus had a father, or he didn’t. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it.

Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.

I can remember at the age of about six being fascinated by the planets and learning all about Mars and Venus and things.

Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose. Accounts of Jesus’s resurrection and ascension are about as well-documented as Jack and the Beanstalk.

If saying that religion should be a private matter and should not have special influence in public life is illiberal, then 74% of U.K. Christians are illiberal, too.

I would like to find a way in which people in Saudi Arabia could learn that they can be something other than a Muslim. Some people may not realize this. Of course, there is the problem that you can get in trouble or get stoned.

I think my love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western countries is betraying itself where Islam is concerned.

God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.

The universe doesn’t owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn’t owe us a nice warm feeling inside.

It’s a difficult business, finding out what’s true about the world, the universe.

The feminists taught us about consciousness-raising.

Every night of our lives, we dream, and our brain concocts visions which are, at least until we wake up, highly convincing. Most of us have had experiences which are verging on hallucination. It shows the power of the brain to knock up illusions.

What is illiberal is not persuasion but imposition of one’s views.

In the 1920s and 1930s, scientists from both the political left and right would not have found the idea of designer babies particularly dangerous – though, of course, they would not have used that phrase.

My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans.

A good scientific theory is one which is falsifiable, which has not been falsified.

We are a very, very unusual species.

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.

Evil is a miscellaneous collection of nasty things that nasty people do.

What’s going to happen when I die? I may be buried, or I may be cremated, I may give my body to science. I haven’t decided yet.

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

I don’t actually think ‘The Selfish Gene’ is a very good title. I think that’s one of my worst titles.

The Bible was written by fallible human beings.

Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.

What’s wrong with being elitist if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive?

If you think about it, 534 members of the U.S. Congress cannot all be religious. That’s just statistical nonsense. Many of them are quite well-educated.

I guess the Democrats have to pretend to be more pious than the Republicans because they are under suspicion of not being.

I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organised ignorance.

You can’t imagine how gratifying it is to have a reader come up to you and say, ‘You changed my life.’

There is no refutation of Darwinian evolution in existence. If a refutation ever were to come about, it would come from a scientist, and not an idiot.

If your plane is being hijacked by an armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants to go on living, there is room for bargaining.

When brains get sufficiently big, presumably, as human brains have, consciousness seems to emerge.

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

Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.

If I say that I am more interested in preventing the slaughter of large whales than I am in improving housing conditions for people, I am likely to shock some of my friends.

I think there is a sort of box-ticking mentality. Not just in the teaching profession. You hear about it in medicine and nursing. It’s a lawyer-driven insistence on meeting prescribed standards rather than just being a good doctor.

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

A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.

Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.

I’ve never been the sort of firebrand that I’ve been made out to be. I’m actually quite a mild person.

George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden.

Just as I wouldn’t expect a gynecologist to have a debate with somebody who believes in the Stork-theory of reproduction, I won’t do debates with Young Earth creationists.

Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated social evolution.

I have a strong feeling that the subject of evolution is beautiful without the excuse of creationists needing to be bashed.

Religious organisations have an automatic tax-free charitable status.

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

I wouldn’t want to have the thought police going to people’s homes, dictating what they teach their children. I don’t want to be Big Brotherish. I would hate that.

My thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings are all in my brain. My brain is going to rot.

Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle.

We are a unique ape. We have language. Other animals have systems of communication that fall far short of that. They don’t have the same ability to communicate complicated conditionals and what-ifs and talk about things that are not present.

Evolution never looks to the future.

Placebos work.

If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible.

Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us – through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology – that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.

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

We have the power to turn against our creators.

Tortoises can survive for weeks without food or water, easily long enough to float in the Humboldt Current from South America to the Galapagos Islands.

Why are we so obsessed with monogamous fidelity?