Richard Dawkins Quotes

370 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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