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Richard Dawkins
291 quotes
“Just because science can't in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn't mean that religion can. It's a simple and logical fallacy to say, 'If science can't do something, therefore religion can'.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is often said, mainly by the 'no-contests', that although there is no positive evidence for the existence of God, nor is there evidence against his existence. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of . But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What worries me about religion is that it teaches people to be satisfied with not understanding the world they live in.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Heart Of The Matter: God Under The Microscope | BBC (1996)
“The wheel may be one of those cases where the engineering solution can be seen in plain view, yet be unattainable in evolution because it lies [on] the other side of a deep valley, cutting unbridgeably across the massif of Mount Improbable.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The popularity of the paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement. I think that the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same appetite which drives the best of true science, and it is an appetite which true science is best qualified to satisfy.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Science Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder", John Brockman, Edge.org, December 29, 1996
“It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Is Science a Religion?", The Humanist (January 1997)
“More generally it is completely unrealistic to claim, as Gould and many others do, that religion keeps itself away from science's turf, restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: When Religion Steps on Science’s Turf", Free Inquiry (1998)
“An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Richard Dawkins on militant atheism, (February 2002)
“The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From tail to tale on the path of pilgrims in life", The Scotsman (9 April 2005)
“Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional "next world" is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Gordy Slack, "The Atheist" Salon.com (28 April 2005)
“Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Steve Paulson, "The flying spaghetti monster" Salon.com (13 October 2006)
“If it's really true, that the museum at has dinosaur fossils which are labelled as being 3000 years old, then that is an educational disgrace. It is debauching the whole idea of a university, and I would strongly encourage any members of Liberty University who may be here...to leave and go to a proper university.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: At in , (23 October 2006) Broadcasted by C-SPAN2
“It's obvious that in an intelligent educated audience such as this university, I stress this university. Who saw fit to give them accreditation?”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: At , (23 October 2006) Broadcasted by C-SPAN2
“The first cause cannot have been an intelligence, let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshiped. Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Why There Almost Certainly Is No God", The Huffington Post, 23/10/2006
“Even the constantly reiterated insistence that we are miserable offenders, born in sin, is a kind of inverted arrogance: such vanity, to presume that our moral conduct has some sort of cosmic significance, as though the Creator of the Universe wouldn’t have better things to do than tot up our black marks and our brownie points. The universe is all concerned with me. Is that not the arrogance that passeth all understanding?”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Intellectual and Moral Courage of Atheism (Originally from 2007; quotes are from the slightly revised 2019 version on the website)
“Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It takes intellectual courage to kick yourself out of your emotional incredulity and persuade yourself that there is no other rational choice.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Atheists have the intellectual courage to accept reality for what it is: wonderfully and shockingly explicable. As an atheist, you have the moral courage to live to the full the only life you’re ever going to get: to fully inhabit reality, rejoice in it, and do your best finally to leave it better than you found it.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even sticking to the higher plane of love, is it so very obvious that you can't love more than one person? We seem to manage it with parental love (parents are reproached if they don't at least pretend to love all their children equally), love of books, of food, of wine (love of Chateau Margaux does not preclude love of a fine Hock, and we don't feel unfaithful to the red when we dally with the white), love of composers, poets, holiday beaches, friends . . . why is erotic love the one exception that everybody instantly acknowledges without even thinking about it?”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Banishing the Green-Eyed Monster, November 2007.
“I'm not one of those who wants to stop Christian traditions. This is historically a Christian country. I'm a cultural Christian the same way as many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims. So, yes, I love singing carols along with everybody else. I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: BBC's Have Your Say (December 2007)
“Gravity is not a version of the truth. It is the truth. Anybody who doubts it is invited to jump out of a tenth-floor window.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (2008)
“It's almost impossible to say anything against Islam in this country, because you are accused of being racist or Islamophobic.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 2008 comment quoted in "Fury over Richard Dawkins's burka jibe as atheist tells of his 'visceral revulsion' at Muslim dress", Daily Mail (10 August 2010)
“We should be offended when children are denied a proper education. We should be offended when children are told they will spend eternity in hell. We should be offended when medical science, for example stem-cell research, is compromised by the bigoted opinions of powerful and above all well-financed ignoramuses. We should be offended when voodoo, of all kinds, is given equal weight to science. We should be offended by hymen reconstruction surgery. We should be offended by 'female circumcision', euphemism for genital mutilation. We should be offended by stoning.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: I Am Offended!, August 3, 2008
“Unfortunately, instead of working out that they have probably misunderstood evolution, creationists conclude, instead, that evolution must be false.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Richard Dawkins causes outcry after likening the burka to a bin liner (10 August 2010), .
“As a liberal I would hesitate to propose a blanket ban on any style of dress because of the implications for individual liberty and freedom of choice.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Richard Dawkins causes outcry after likening the burka to a bin liner (10 August 2010), .
“Every person I met believes if there is any disagreement between the Koran and science, then the Koran wins. It's just utterly deplorable. These are now British children who are having their minds stuffed with alien rubbish. Occasionally, my colleagues lecturing in universities lament having undergraduate students walk out of their classes when they talk about evolution. This is almost entirely Muslims.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dawkins attacks 'alien rubbish' taught in Muslim faith schools", Daily Mail (8 October 2011)
“I can't be sure God does not exist... On a scale of seven, where one means I know he exists, and seven I know he doesn't, I call myself a six... That doesn't mean I'm absolutely confident, that I absolutely know, because I don't.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am often accused of expressing contempt and despising religious people. I don't despise religious people, I despise what they stand for. I like to quote the British journalist Johann Hari who said, "I have so much respect for you, that I cannot respect your ridiculous ideas.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What I can't understand is why you can't see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing – that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm not clever enough to be a physicist.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: When asked about why he chose to become a biologist. UR Samtiden - Verklighetens magi 27 October 2012.
“I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don't look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can't find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Richard Dawkins debates Rowan Williams (2013)
“I'm sure Obama is an atheist, I'm sure Kennedy was an atheist, but I doubt if Pope Frank is.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Bill Maher (2013)
“SJWs can't forgive Shakespeare for having the temerity to be white and male.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In 2014, as quoted in The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement (2015), Stephen LeDrew
“Science is the best way to do anything (if you want to do terrible things with technology, a terrible weapons for example science is the best way to do it because science is the best way to do anything)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Evidence is the only good reason to believe anything”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Moral philosophers say things like, ‘What is actually wrong with cannibalism?’ There are two ways of responding to that: one is to shrink back in horror and say, ‘Cannibalism! Cannibalism! We can’t talk about cannibalism!’ The other is to say, ‘Well, actually, what is wrong with cannibalism?’ Then you work it out and you tease it out and you decide yes, actually, cannibalism is wrong, but for the following reasons. So I'd like to think that my moral values at least partly come from reasoning. Trying to suppress the gut reaction as much as possible.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Sophie Elmhirst (2015), (9 June 2015)
“[Those who support Kim Davis's refusal to issue marriage licenses have] the unutterable gall to imply that they are being oppressed because they're not allow to oppress other people.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Public conversation with Penn Jillette at Live Talks Los Angeles (1 October 2015) at 50:25 in the video
“Eternity is best spent under a general anesthetic – which is what is going to happen.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Joe Rogan on The Joe Rogan Experience (2019); (20 January 2019)
“Is trans ideology becoming a religion? Well, it has some of the attributes. [...] Of course, it's not a religion in the sense of believing in the supernatural, but the zealous hunting down and punishing of heretics, that's very like a religion.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interviewed by Judith Woods, as cited in "Richard Dawkins interview: 'I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words'", The Telegraph (17 September 2023)
“I speak as a biologist. There aren't many absolutely clear distinctions in biology. Mostly what we have is a spectrum. But the male-female divide is exceptional in biology. It really is a true binary.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interviewed by Judith Woods, as cited in "Richard Dawkins interview: 'I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words'", The Telegraph (17 September 2023)
“The selfish gene theory is Darwin’s theory, expressed in a way that Darwin did not choose but whose aptness, I should like to think, he would instantly have recognized and delighted in. It is in fact a logical outgrowth of orthodox , but expressed as a novel image. Rather than focus on the individual organism, it takes a gene’s eye view of nature. It is a different way of seeing, not a different theory.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Preface to Second Edition (1989)
“We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin. To be fair, others had had inklings of the truth, but it was Darwin who first put together a coherent and tenable account of why we exist.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun, but the full implications of Darwin’s revolution have yet to be widely realized.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source