Richard Dawkins quotes

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. (Richard Dawkins)
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time. View quote
Richard Dawkins
By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. View quote
Richard Dawkins
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? View quote
Richard Dawkins
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. View quote
Richard Dawkins
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. View quote
Richard Dawkins
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. View quote
Richard Dawkins
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. View quote
Richard Dawkins
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. View quote
Richard Dawkins
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry. View quote
Richard Dawkins
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. (Richard Dawkins)
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. View quote
Richard Dawkins
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. View quote
Richard Dawkins
They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines. View quote
Richard Dawkins
The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale. View quote
Richard Dawkins
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. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun. View quote
Richard Dawkins
I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women. View quote
Richard Dawkins
I'm sure Obama is an atheist, I'm sure Kennedy was an atheist, but I doubt if Pope Frank is. View quote
Richard Dawkins
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isnt it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it This is how I answer when I am askedas I am surprisingly oftenwhy I bother to get up in the mornings. View quote
Richard Dawkins
American political opportunities are loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest. (Richard Dawkins)
My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a 'they' as opposed to a 'we' can be identified at all. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It's a sort of crime against childhood. View quote
Richard Dawkins
We don't need fossils – the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution. View quote
Richard Dawkins
There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism. View quote
Richard Dawkins