Top 200 Richard Dawkins Quotes

I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.

I have begun several projects which were never completed, not necessarily because they failed, but because I got interested in other things.

The whole idea of creating saints, it’s pure ‘Monty Python.’ They have to clock up two miracles.

In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of ‘The Selfish Gene,’ I did actually use the metaphor of a ‘virus.’ So when anybody talks about something going viral on the Internet, that is exactly what a meme is, and it looks as though the word has been appropriated for a subset of that.

We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us – through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology – that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.

To put it bluntly, American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.

Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: It gives them something to do.

The central dogma of the New Testament is that Jesus died as a scapegoat for the sin of Adam and the sins that all we unborn generations might have been contemplating in the future. Adam’s sin is perhaps mitigated by the extenuating circumstance that he didn’t exist.

Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit.

I wouldn’t want to have the thought police going to people’s homes, dictating what they teach their children. I don’t want to be Big Brotherish. I would hate that.

Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose. Accounts of Jesus’s resurrection and ascension are about as well-documented as Jack and the Beanstalk.

Selfish genes actually explain altruistic individuals, and to me that’s crystal-clear.

A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.

Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it.

A constellation is not an entity at all, not the kind of thing that Uranus, or anything else, can sensibly be said to ‘move into.’

Tortoises can survive for weeks without food or water, easily long enough to float in the Humboldt Current from South America to the Galapagos Islands.

I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition.

I did not end up as broadly educated as my Cambridge colleagues, but I graduated probably better equipped to write a book on my chosen subject.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a jet plane’s exhaust. A great improvement on a simple ballistic shell, it still cannot discriminate particular targets. It could not zero in on a designated New York skyscraper if launched from as far away as Boston.

In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science because it was for the good of the Communist Party.

I’m not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.

Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium.

We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can’t disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

I love words.

We should take astrology seriously. No, I don’t mean we should believe in it. I am talking about fighting it seriously instead of humouring it as a piece of harmless fun.

I think a fundamentalist is somebody who believes something unshakably and isn’t going to change their mind.

I was never much bothered about moral questions like, ‘How could there be a good God when there’s so much evil in the world?’

Of course you can use the products of science to do bad things, but you can use them to do good things, too.

I have a strong feeling that the subject of evolution is beautiful without the excuse of creationists needing to be bashed.

What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them.

Notoriously, the United States is the most religious of the Western advanced nations. It’s a bit mysterious why that is.

I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s something for research.

Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.

My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.

I detest ‘Jingle Bells,’ ‘White Christmas,’ ‘Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,’ and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.

The interesting question would be whether there’s a Darwinian process, a kind of selection process whereby some memes are more likely to spread than others, because people like them, because they’re popular, because they’re catchy or whatever it might be.

I certainly would absolutely never do what some of my American colleagues do and object to religious symbols being used, putting crosses up in the public square and things like that. I don’t fret about that at all; I’m quite happy about that.

Even if ‘going retrograde’ or ‘moving into Aquarius’ were real phenomena, something that planets actually do, what influence could they possibly have on human events? A planet is so far away that its gravitational pull on a new-born baby would be swamped by the gravitational pull of the doctor’s paunch.

There is something cheap about magic that works just because it is magic.

I don’t know what to think about magic and fairy tales.

We are a very, very unusual species.

It’s a difficult business, finding out what’s true about the world, the universe.

It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have.

Although many of us fear death, I think there is something illogical about it.

I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality – you’re told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.

I once wrote that anybody who believes the world is only 6,000 years old is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.

Islands are natural workshops of evolution.

I’m fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there’s a scientific lesson, for example – when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That’s actually very valuable.

The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling – though not to me.

Publishers like a good buzz, and negative responses sell books just as well as positive ones.

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.

The feminists taught us about consciousness-raising.

If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle.

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

Evil is a miscellaneous collection of nasty things that nasty people do.

We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.

Natural selection is anything but random.

When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are ‘duplicate me’ instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.

I love romantic poetry.

Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang, but interposing an outside intelligence does nothing to add to that knowledge, as we still know nothing about the creation of that intelligence.

I would like people to appreciate science in the same way they appreciate the arts.

I like to think ‘The God Delusion’ is a humorous book. I think, actually, it’s full of laughs. And people who describe it as a polarizing book or as an aggressive book, it’s just that very often they haven’t read it.

Coming out as an atheist can cost an academic his or her job in some parts of America, and many choose to keep quiet about their atheism.

The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.