Richard Dawkins Quotes

370 Sourced Quotes

Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old.

Richard Dawkins
As a microscope helps our minds to burrow through alien galleries of cell membranes, and as a telescope lifts us to far galaxies, another way of coming out of the anesthetic is to return, in our imaginations, through geological time.

Richard Dawkins
Most thoughtful people would agree that morality in the absence of policing is somehow more truly moral than the kind of false morality that vanishes as soon as the police go on strike or the spy camera is switched off, whether the spy camera is a real one monitored in the police station or an imaginary one in heaven.

Richard Dawkins
There may be some deep questions about the cosmos that are forever beyond science. The mistake is to think they are therefore not beyond religion too.

Richard Dawkins
If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have to
look.

Richard Dawkins
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

Richard Dawkins
A bat is a machine, whose internal electronics are so wired up that its wing muscles cause it to home in on insects, as an unconscious guided missile homes in on an aeroplane.

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

Richard Dawkins
If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope to eventually understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.

Richard Dawkins
All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation.

Richard Dawkins
Science provokes more hostility than ever, sometimes with good reason, often from people who know nothing about it and use their hostility as an excuse not to learn. Depressingly many people still fall for the discredited cliché that scientific explanation corrodes poetic sensibility.

Richard Dawkins
[Richard Leakey is] a robust hero of a man, who actually lives up to the cliché, a big man in every sense of the word. Like other big men he is loved by many, feared by some, and not over-preoccupied with the judgments of any.

Richard Dawkins
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.

Richard Dawkins
The present Luddism over genetic engineering may die a natural death as the computer-illiterate generation is superseded.... 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.

Richard Dawkins
Dawkin's Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurationism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity.

Richard Dawkins
Sometimes in life it is a good idea to stop,sometimes it is a good idea to go on. The trick is to decide when to stop

Richard Dawkins
We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance.

Richard Dawkins
The account of the origin of life that I shall give is necessarily speculative; by definition, nobody was around to see what happened.

Richard Dawkins
All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.

Richard Dawkins
You can be moved to tears by numbers — provided they are encoded and decoded fast enough.

Richard Dawkins
Science, like proper literary studies, can be hard and challenging but science is — also like proper literary studies — wonderful.

Richard Dawkins
Effective searching procedures become, when the search-space is sufficiently large, indistinguishable from true creativity.

Richard Dawkins
Nowadays theologians aren't quite so straightforward as Paley. They don't point to complex living mechanisms and say that they are self-evidently designed by a creator, just like a watch. But there is a tendency to point to them and say 'It is impossible to believe' that such complexity, or such perfection, could have evolved by natural selection. Whenever I read such a remark, I always feel like writing 'Speak for yourself' in the margin.

Richard Dawkins
The bitter hatreds that now poison Middle Eastern politics are rooted in the real or perceived wrong of the setting up of a Jewish State in an Islamic region. In view of all that the Jews had been through, it must have seemed a fair and humane solution. Probably deep familiarity with the Old Testament had given the European and American decision-makers some sort of idea that this really was the historic homeland of the Jews.

Richard Dawkins
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.

Richard Dawkins
The mystic is content to bask in the wonder and revel in a mystery that we were not "meant" to understand. The scientist feels the same wonder but is restless, not content; recognizes the mystery as profound, then adds, "But we're working on it."

Richard Dawkins
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.

Richard Dawkins
False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment.

Richard Dawkins
Explaining is a difficult art. You can explain something so that your reader understands the words; and you can explain something so that the reader feels it in the marrow of his bones. To do the latter, it sometimes isn't enough to lay the evidence before the reader in a dispassionate way. You have to become an advocate and use the tricks of the advocate's trade.

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

Richard Dawkins