Quotes by Richard Dawkins

I'm not much given to straight, irony-free hero-worship.

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

Beauty arises out of human inspiration.

In the beginning was simplicity.

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

Placebos work.

I love words.

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.

The truth is more magical in the best and most exciting sense of the word, than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.

There is another kind of altruism that seems to go beyond that, a kind of super-altruism, which humans appear to have. And I think that does need a Darwinian explanation.

If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.

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

All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.

DNA is ROM. It can be read millions of times over, but only written to once -- when it is first assembled the birth of the cell in which it resides.

I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden.

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point? The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.

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

Brains function on a need-to-know basis, and the need-to-know in order to survive on the African plains as hunter-gatherers. It's pure bonus if we manage to understand a bit about relativity and quantum theory as well. I think it's a tremendous privilege that we can understand as much as we can.

The fear of Hell is a very powerful motivation.

Biology is the study of the complex things in the Universe. Physics is the study of the simple ones.

Being an atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily, and fully.

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

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.

You could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for an answer.

We are survival machines -- robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.

It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests.

Genetic modification, like any other kind of modification, is good if you modify in a good direction, bad if you modify in a bad direction.

A largely unrecognized danger of the obsessive hysteria surrounding genetically modified foods is crying wolf. I fear that, if the green movement's high-amplitude warnings over GMOs turn out to be empty, people will be dangerously disinclined to listen to other and more serious warnings.

Human psychology has a near universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire.

All religious beliefs seem weird to those not brought up in them.

All animals are minor variations on a very particular theme.

The chicken is only an egg's way for making another egg.

Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?

The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened.

Regarding the accusations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are, they are not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child Catholic in the first place.

It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise.

Atheism is not a religion. Abstinence is not a sex position.

Do you really mean the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward? That's not morality, that's just sucking up.

You don't believe that the Earth is round only if you're an astronaut. You don't believe Napoleon existed only if you're a historian. You believe these things because they're facts, proved by evidence.

The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, nor an eight-level code as in some telephone systems, but a quaternary code with four symbols. The machine code of the genes is uncannily computerlike.

There are no natural borderlines in evolution. The illusion of a borderline is created by the fact that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct.

I think there could be a very large number who are creationists by default. Those are the people I want to reach.

Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous.

If it is solely an evolutionary convenience, there is really no such thing as good or evil.

Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different senses.

The thing that defines a species is that all members have the same addressing system for their DNA.

DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

Suppose that there's a gene that makes you gay if you were bottle-fed but that has some completely different effect if you were breast-fed. So in the days before bottles were invented that gene would not have manifested itself as gay behavior, but now that bottles are common it can do so.

There is an attitude in the culture that says that everybody is entitled to their opinion. You got to respect their opinion. No, you damn well haven't got to respect their opinion.

Are science and religion converging? No. There are modern scientists whose words sound religious but whose beliefs, on close examination, turn out to be identical to those of other scientists who straightforwardly call themselves atheists.

What shall it profit a male if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his immortal genes?

The body is a survival machine programmed to propagate the genes that reside inside it.

In true natural selection, if a body has what it takes to survive, its genes automatically survive because they are inside it. So the genes that survive tend to be, automatically, those genes that confer on bodies the qualities that assist them to survive.

Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.

Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.

My computer is a very complex gadget and it was designed by many designers, so why must the universe have only a single designer and not many designers?

Which of our unnoticed isms will the hindsight of future generations condemn?

Earlier than about 10,000 years ago, all human populations were hunter gatherers. Soon, probably none will be. Those not extinct will be 'civilised' -- or corrupted, depending on your point of view.

The illusion of design is so successful that to this day most Americans (including, significantly, many influential and rich Americans) stubbornly refuse to believe it is an illusion.

Anybody who objects to cloning on principle has to answer to all the identical twins in the world who might be insulted by the thought that there is something offensive about their very existence. Clones are simply identical twins.

Evolution is just a theory? Well, so is gravity and I don't see you jumping out of buildings.

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 read in the paper today the list of the most popular boys' names in Britain. The first was Jack, the second was Mohammed. That makes me feel a little bit worried.

Our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude of size and speed which our bodies operate at. We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms.

Science shares with religion the claim that it answers deep questions about origins, the nature of life, and the cosmos. But there the resemblance ends. Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.

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.

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.

It's known that stress gives rise to disease. It's also known that many diseases, especially stress-related diseases, can be cured by placebos -- pills that have no medicinal effect, but people think they do, and so they do.

We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational.

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

I am persuaded that 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like...eternal hell.

Mysteries do not lose their poetry when solved. Quite the contrary; the solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle and, in any case, when you have solved one mystery you uncover others, perhaps to inspire greater poetry.

The fact that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of something does not put existence and non-existence on an even footing.

The habit of questioning authority is one of the most valuable gifts that a book, or a teacher, can give a young would-be scientist.

I am not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where facts are concerned.

Ideally, I'd like everybody to be secular.

The best scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried.

Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops.

Religion is the root of quite a lot of evil.

Our subjective judgment of what seems like a good bet is irrelevant to what is actually a good bet.

There is no reason to regard God as immune from consideration along the spectrum of probabilities. And there is certainly no reason to suppose that, just because God can be neither proved nor disproved, his probability of existence is 50 per cent.

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use.

The mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.

Germ-line replicators, then, are units that actually survive or fail to survive, the difference constituting natural selection.

Race does not come into it. It is pure religion and culture. Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam. That would have been a fair comparison.

Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger -- even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all -- and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes.

The idea of tiny changes cumulated over many steps is an immensely powerful idea, capable of explaining an enormous range of things that would be otherwise inexplicable.

There is a tendency for people to say evolution is only a theory. That is inappropriate.

Some people find clarity threatening. They like muddle, confusion, obscurity. So when somebody does no more than speak clearly it sounds threatening.

It is the effects on the world of successful active germ-line replicators that we see as adaptations.

There is a hierarchy of entities embedded in larger entities, and in theory the concept of vehicle might be applied to any level of the hierarchy.

The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans.

You believe that all humanity came from Adam and Eve, and humans have not evolved at all since. So tell me; between the two of them, which was black, which was white, and which was Asian?

Alister McGrath has now written two books with my name in the title. The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, 'was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction).

The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.

Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives.

I am not attacking any particular God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, whenever or wherever they have been or will be invented.

St. Augustine wrote that basically it is not possible to understand what was being described in Genesis. It was not intended as a science textbook. It was intended as a description of who God was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with God.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.

There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism .

It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that if Darwinism was really a theory of chance, it could not work.

Let us understand Darwinism so we can walk in the opposite direction when it comes to setting up society.

The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe it just happened by blind chance...the obvious alternative to chance is an Intelligent Designer.

Either blasphemy is a victimless crime or its victim is powerful enough to take care of himself without any help from you.

The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear.

St. Augustine explicitly warns against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of looking ridiculous. If you step back from that one narrow interpretation, what the Bible describes is very consistent with the Big Bang.

The idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe.

There is great variation in brain power all the way from Einstien on one hand to Sarah Palin on the other.

I don't want to sound callous. I mean, even if I have nothing to offer, that doesn't matter, because that still doesn't mean that what anybody else has to offer therefore has to be true.

However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who will never even be offered life in the first place?

Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But it cannot have been the sort of God that we need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early.

Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science.

We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe.

Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation.

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

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.

Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.

A retaliator behaves like a hawk when he is attacked by a hawk, and like a dove when he meets a dove. When he meets another retaliator he plays like a dove. A retaliator is a conditional strategist. His behaviour depends on the behaviour of his opponent.

The important point is that it is the children's privilege to decide what they shall think, and not their parents' privilege to impose it by force majeure.

Thus the creationist's favourite question What is the use of half an eye? Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye.

There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over.

With respect to those meanings of 'human' that are relevant to the morality of abortion, any fetus is less human than an adult pig.

It is all too easy to mistake passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will.

I think what attracts me about the Electric Monk is that it's such an eloquent example of the futility of belief for belief's sake. I mean there's only any point in believing something if it's true.

Alternative medicine is defined as that set of practices that cannot be tested, refuse to be tested or consistently fail tests.

If we ever talk to aliens, their civilisation will be far more advanced than ours (because of distances involved). They won't be religious!

Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once.

If the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we should none of us be here.

And the beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here.

I am very hostile to religion because it is enormously dominant, especially in American life. And I don't buy the argument that, well, it's harmless. I think it is harmful, partly because I care passionately about what's true.

Bad things, like good things don't happen any more often than they ought to by chance. the universe has no mind, no feelings, and no personality, so it doesn't do things in order to either hurt or please you. bad things happen because things happen.

Beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture, they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution.

Evolution normally does not come to a halt, but constantly 'tracks' the changing environment.

Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards.

If circumcision has any justification AT ALL, it should be medical only. Parents' religion is the worst of all reasons -- pure child abuse.

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).

That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: 'the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation.

The efforts of apologists to find genuinely distinguished modern scientists who are religious have an air of desperation, generating the unmistakably hollow sound or bottoms of barrels being scraped.

If all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism, I would be the first to admit it, and I would immediately change my mind. As things stand, however, all available evidence (and there is a vast amount of it) favours evolution.

Islamic myths are mostly actually plagiarized from the Christian ones, both biblically and in terms of modern creationism. If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.

Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant.

Yesterday's dangerous idea is today's orthodoxy and tomorrow's cliché.

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.

It has been convincingly demonstrated that countries where there are high rates of poverty, or high rates of economic inequality, are the countries with the highest rates of religious beliefs.

No educated person believes the Adam and Eve myth nowadays, but it's surprising how many parents think that it's somehow fun to pass on this falsehood to their children...I would want to argue that the truth of evolution is more interesting and more poetic.

The evidence for evolution is so compelling that the only way to save the creation theory is to assume that God deliberately planted enormous quantities of evidence to make it look as if evolution had happened.

I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody is too polite -- or too devout -- to notice: religion, and specifically the devaluing effect that religion has on human life.

An astronomically overwhelming majority of the people who could be born never will be. You are one of a tiny minority whose number came up. Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.

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?

Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don't know it.

My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about.

I need to learn not to bend over backwards to be nice to faith-heads. Give these people an inch and they take a league. I think, as I did when I wrote The God Delusion, that the Roman Catholic Church is a disgusting institution, the second most evil religion in the world.

The truly adult view ... is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.

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.

There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.

Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.

The majority of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all.

A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.

It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe.

Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun.

There's no point of having faith if you have evidence.

Organizing atheists is a bit like herding cats; They are on the whole too intelligent and independent minded to lend themselves to being herded.

Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.

We don't usually see this happening but, like detectives arriving on the scene after a crime, we can piece together what must have happened from the evidence that remains.

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.

The Bishop goes on to the human eye, asking rhetorically, and with the implication that there is no answer, 'How could an organ so complex evolve?' This is not an argument, it is simply an affirmation of incredulity.

The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is Enough! Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's divisive and it's dangerous.

The cynic about human nature might say that religious morality is an effective way of keeping people in line. The threat of hell, the reward of heaven, but the rules of the holy books are out of date and often barbaric.

None of us will have forgotten that lesson. What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them: education in the true sense, very different from today's assessment-mad exam culture.

When we started out and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, I provided what I thought were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea.

I might respect you as a brilliant intellect, runner, musician or juggler. But respect your BELIEFS? Only if they're supported by evidence.

Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and they are good ones, which would probably end up persuading me. But hasn't the time come when we should stop being frightened even to put the question?

Most of us happily disavow fairies, astrology and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, without first immersing ourselves in books of Pastafarian theology etc.

The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics.

Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when.

It is time to stop the mealy-mouthed euphemisms: 'Nationalists', 'Loyalists', 'Communities', 'Ethnic Groups', 'Cultures', 'Civilizations'. Religions is the word you need. Religions is the word you are struggling hypocritially to avoid.