Richard Dawkins Quotes

370 Sourced Quotes

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point.

Richard Dawkins
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.

Richard Dawkins
Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.

Richard Dawkins
In medieval times, the Church used to sell 'indulgences' for money. This amounted to paying for some number of days' remission from purgatory, and the Church literally (and with breathtaking presumption) issued signed certificates specifying the number of days off that had been purchased.... And of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history....

Richard Dawkins
Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.

Richard Dawkins
If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so. The trick is to want the right things, then science will provide you with the most effective methods of achieving them.

Richard Dawkins
Reductionism is a dirty word, and a kind of 'holistier than thou' self-righteousness has become fashionable.

Richard Dawkins
You know you've won the argument when the only counter argument they can find is that you are white or male or old.

Richard Dawkins
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 colors.

Richard Dawkins
Quantum mechanics, that brilliantly successful flagship theory of modern science, is deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Eastern mystics have always been deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Therefore, Eastern mystics must have been talking about quantum theory all along.

Richard Dawkins
It is a very helpful insight to say we are vehicles for our DNA, we are hosts for DNA parasites which are our genes. Those are insights which help us to understand an aspect of life. But it's emotive to say, that's all there is to it, we might as well give up going to Shakespeare plays and give up listening to music and things, because that's got nothing to do with it. That's an entirely different subject.

Richard Dawkins
Admittedly, people of a theological bent are often chronically incapable of distinguishing what is true from what they'd like to be true.

Richard Dawkins
Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.

Richard Dawkins
We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think we've always known what that means, and we think evolution makes it even clearer. But it doesn't. It is by no means clear that it means anything at all. Or if it means anything, it means so many different things to be misleading, even pernicious.

Richard Dawkins
But there are many unsophisticated Christians out there … who take the Bible very seriously indeed as a literal and accurate record of history and hence as evidence supporting the religious beliefs. Do these people never open the book that they believe is the literal truth? Why don't they notice the glaring contradictions?

Richard Dawkins
If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine.

Richard Dawkins
When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.

Richard Dawkins
Eugenics was not inspired by Darwin's natural selection but by ancient agricultural ARTIFICIAL selection. Eugenics is UNnatural selection.

Richard Dawkins
It is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions.

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

Richard Dawkins
Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven.

Richard Dawkins
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.

Richard Dawkins
The Roman Catholic Church is an institution for whose gains the phrase "ill-gotten" might have been specially invented. And of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history, the medieval equivalent of the Nigerian Internet scam but far more successful.

Richard Dawkins
It is forever true that DNA is a double helix, true that if you are a chimpanzee (or an octopus or a kangaroo) [and] trace your ancestors back far enough you will eventually hit a shared ancestor. To a pedant, these are still hypotheses which might be falsified tomorrow. But they never will be.

Richard Dawkins
There is an appetite for wonder, and isn't true science well qualified to feed it?

Richard Dawkins
The real universe has mystery enough to need no help from obscurantist hucksters.

Richard Dawkins
Cheetah genes cooperate with cheetah genes but not with camel genes, and vice versa. This is not because cheetah genes, even in the most poetic sense, see any virtue in the preservation of the cheetah species. They are not working to save the cheetah from extinction like some molecular World Wildlife Fund.

Richard Dawkins
I had always been scrupulously careful to avoid the smallest suggestion of infant indoctrination, which I think is ultimately responsible for much of the evil in the world. Others, less close to her, showed no such scruples, which upset me, as I very much wanted her, as I want all children, to make up her own mind freely when she became old enough to do so. I would encourage her to think, without telling her what to think.

Richard Dawkins
Reason and logic are not masculine instruments of oppression. To suggest that they are is an insult to women.

Richard Dawkins
To describe religions as mind viruses is sometimes interpreted as contemptuous or even hostile. It is both. I am often asked why I am so hostile to organized religion.

Richard Dawkins