Top 939 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

We have a huge amount of DNA in common with jellyfish.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The Bible was written by fallible human beings.

Christopher Hitchens was a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion far wider than anybody I know.

Humans are just a very, very small part of the panoply of life, and it is arguable that in a certain sense, humans have emancipated themselves from Darwinian selection.

If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it.

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

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.

I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.

It is immoral to brand children with religion. 'This is a Catholic child.' 'That is a Muslim child.' I want everyone to flinch when they hear such a phrase, just as they would if they heard, 'That is a Marxist child.'

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.

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes.

The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling - though not to me.

Although many of us fear death, I think there is something illogical about it.

Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it.

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

Segregation has no place in the education system.

'What is the purpose of the universe?' is a silly question.

Christopher Hitchens was a great warrior, a magnificent orator, a pugilist and a gentleman. He was kind, but he took no prisoners when arguing with idiots.

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

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.

There are quite a lot of YouTube clips of me that have gone viral. One that I think of is of a young woman at a lecture I was giving - she came from Liberty University, which is a ludicrous religious institution. She said, 'What if you are wrong?' and I answered that rather briefly, and that's gone viral.

Natural selection is anything but random.

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?

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

My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.

Why are we so obsessed with monogamous fidelity?

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.

Discrimination is not liberal. Arguing against discrimination is not intolerance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.

A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence.

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