Richard Dawkins Quotes

370 Sourced Quotes

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
Can omniscient God, who Knows the future, find The omnipotence to Change His future mind?

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
The Darwinian theory is in principle capable of explaining life. No other theory that has ever been suggested is in principle capable of explaining life.

Richard Dawkins
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.

Richard Dawkins
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).

Richard Dawkins
Maybe we are neo-Darwinists today, but let us spell neo with a very small n! Our neo-Darwinism is very much in the spirit of Darwin himself.

Richard Dawkins
I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drfiting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene panting far behind.

Richard Dawkins
The message is clear: those who will not accommodate, who will not temper, who insist on keeping only the purest and wildest strain of their heritage alive, we will be obliged, reluctantly, to cage or disarm, and we will do our best to disable the memes they fight for.

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.

Richard Dawkins
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.

Richard Dawkins
The stars have larger agendas in which the preoccupations of human pettiness do not figure.

Richard Dawkins
I became a little alarmed at the number of my readers who took the meme more positively as a theory of human culture in its own right - either to criticize it (unfairly, given my original modest intention) or to carry it far beyond the limits of what I then thought justified. This was why I may have seemed to backtrack.

Richard Dawkins
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.

Richard Dawkins
The fact that we slowly apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discover it, should not subtract from its wonder.

Richard Dawkins
The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist.

Richard Dawkins
We cannot preserve all the features of the cultural world in which these treasures flourished. We wouldn't want to.

Richard Dawkins
We have an appetite for wonder, a poetic appetite, which real science ought to be feeding but which is being hijacked, often for monetary gain, by purveyors of superstition, the paranormal and astrology.

Richard Dawkins
The mob hysteria over pedophiles has reached epidemic proportions and driven parents to panic. Today's Just Williams, today's Huck Finns, today's Swallows and Amazons are deprived of the freedom to roam that was one of the delights of childhood in earlier times (when the actual, as opposed to the perceived, risk of molestation was probably no less).

Richard Dawkins
For Darwin, any evolution that had to be helped over the jumps by God was no evolution at all. It made a nonsense of the central point of evolution.

Richard Dawkins
Darwin's achievement, like Einstein's, is universal and timeless.

Richard Dawkins
Matthew and Luke handle the problem differently, by deciding that Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem after all. But they get him there by different routes.

Richard Dawkins
I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca-or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of Kyoto or, of course, the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

Richard Dawkins