Richard Dawkins Quotes

370 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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