Top 939 Quotes & Sayings by Richard Dawkins - Page 3

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'm sure Obama is an atheist; I'm sure Kennedy was an atheist, but I doubt if Pope Frank is.

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

In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science because it was for the good of the Communist Party.

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.

Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it.

Evolution never looks to the future.

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

Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.

One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.

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

It doesn't hurt my feeling when I get vilified by fundamentalist religious people. I've actually made comedy out of it. I've made light of that.

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

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

I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.

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

The interesting question would be whether there's a Darwinian process, a kind of selection process whereby some memes are more likely to spread than others, because people like them, because they're popular, because they're catchy or whatever it might be.

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.

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

What Darwinian theory shows us is that all human races are extremely close to each other. None of them is in any sense ancestral to any other; none of them is more primitive than any other. We are all modern races of exactly equal status, evolutionarily speaking.

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.

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.

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.

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

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

Don't feel embarrassed if you've never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name, either.

I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.

In the World Wars, people were perfectly able to shoot other people just because they belonged to the wrong country, without ever asking what their opinions were. Faith too is like that.

People like to trace their ancestry.

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

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

When a company seeks a new chief executive officer, or a university a new vice-chancellor, enormous trouble is taken to find the best person.

What has 'theology' ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has 'theology' ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? What makes you think that 'theology' is a subject at all?

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.

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

I mean I think that when you've got a big brain, when you find yourself planted in a world with a brain big enough to understand quite a lot of what you see around you, but not everything, you naturally fall to thinking about the deep mysteries. Where do we come from? Where does the world come from? Where does the universe come from?

Islands are natural workshops of evolution.

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

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

I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when you're being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have to improvise, you can change sentences around, and they're not exactly right.

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.

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

We are a very, very unusual species.

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

Saddam Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran/Iraq war, of the invasion of Kuwait, and of the subsequent era of sanctions culminating in the current invasion.

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

Beauty arises out of human inspiration.

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.

I love romantic poetry.

Words are not trivial. They matter because they raise consciousness.

I was confirmed at my prep school at the age of 13.

I don't think that it's up to government to dictate what people should wear.

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?

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.

I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' or 'Islamic children.'

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'?

I love words.

If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.

Sometimes I think it's possible to mistake desire for clarity and talking in a no-nonsense way for aggression.