Richard Dawkins quotes - page 2

If it's really true, that the museum at Liberty University has dinosaur fossils which are labelled as being 3000 years old, then that is an educational disgrace. It is debauching the whole idea of a university, and I would strongly encourage any members of Liberty University who may be here... to leave and go to a proper university. (Richard Dawkins)
I can't be sure God does not exist... On a scale of seven, where one means I know he exists, and seven I know he doesn't, I call myself a six... That doesn't mean I'm absolutely confident, that I absolutely know, because I don't. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, "I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection". I have dubbed this kind of fallacy "the Argument from Personal Incredulity". Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience. View quote
Richard Dawkins
If we ever talk to aliens, their civilisation will be far more advanced than ours (because of distances involved). They won't be religious! View quote
Richard Dawkins
You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Gravity is not a version of the truth. It is the truth. Anybody who doubts it is invited to jump out of a tenth-floor window. View quote
Richard Dawkins
... you need more than luck to navigate successfully through a thousand sieves in succession. View quote
Richard Dawkins
If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place. Epidemiology, not evidence. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Don't ask God to cure cancer & world poverty. He's too busy finding you a parking space & fixing the weather for your barbecue. View quote
Richard Dawkins
An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. View quote
Richard Dawkins
I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented. (Richard Dawkins)
What I can't understand is why you can't see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing – that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?”. View quote
Richard Dawkins
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. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random. View quote
Richard Dawkins
I am thrilled to be alive at time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it. View quote
Richard Dawkins
We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. View quote
Richard Dawkins
The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you. (Richard Dawkins)
I mean it as a compliment when I say that you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for an answer. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality that would not imply that the theory of evolution was false. View quote
Richard Dawkins
A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth! View quote
Richard Dawkins
Though the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth consuming, hostility provoking rituals, the anti-factual, counter-productive fantasies of religion. View quote
Richard Dawkins