Top 939 Quotes & Sayings by Richard Dawkins - Page 2

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

Bishops sit in the House of Lords automatically.

There is something cheap about magic that works just because it is magic.

There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity.

I think a fundamentalist is somebody who believes something unshakably and isn't going to change their mind.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.

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.

The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.

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.

A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a jet plane's exhaust. A great improvement on a simple ballistic shell, it still cannot discriminate particular targets. It could not zero in on a designated New York skyscraper if launched from as far away as Boston.

The feminists taught us about consciousness-raising.

To put it bluntly, American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

Rather than say he's an atheist, a friend of mine says, 'I'm a tooth fairy agnostic,' meaning he can't disprove God but thinks God is about as likely as the tooth fairy.

The state of Israel seems to owe its very existence to the American Jewish vote, while at the same time consigning the non-religious to political oblivion.

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.

I didn't know children were expected to have literary heroes, but I certainly had one, and I even identified with him at one time: Doctor Dolittle, whom I now half identify with the Charles Darwin of Beagle days.

People believe the only alternative to randomness is intelligent design.

There's clearly a lot of Ludditism, and you see it in all the hysteria about every scientific story.

Something pretty mysterious had to give rise to the origin of the universe.

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

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 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.

A triumph of consciousness-raising has been the homosexual hijacking of the word 'gay.'

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.

Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.

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

I don't do formal debates, because formal debates where you have two people up on a stage in equal status, and each of them is given 20 minutes to give their point of view, and then 10 minutes for a rebuttal, or whatever, that creates the illusion that you really do have here two equal points of view of equal scientific standing.

Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit.

Public sharing is an important part of science.

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

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?'

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

I have begun several projects which were never completed, not necessarily because they failed, but because I got interested in other things.

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

As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.

At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes.

It is a lamentable observation that because of the way our laws are skewed toward the plaintiff, London has become the libel capital of the world.

I don't feel depressed. I feel elated.

There are people who try to get atheists to form a sort of atheist church and have atheist community singsongs and things. I don't see the need for that, but if people want to do it, why shouldn't they?

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

We frequently look into the future of mankind and see dangers. We see if we carry on doing what we are doing in 20 years' time there will be no rainforests left, just to use one example. Looking into the future may be one of the reasons that brains evolved in the first place.

It has become almost a cliche 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.

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.

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.

If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, authority, revelation or faith, they will automatically work out for themselves that they are atheists.

I do understand people when they say that you destroy the magic of childhood if you encourage too much skeptical questioning.

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.

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.