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Richard Dawkins
291 quotes
“We admit that we are like , but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes — the and orangutans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans but excludes humans.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[...] if I am asked for a single phrase to characterize my role as Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, I think I would claim Advocate for Disinterested Truth.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously. A joyful life is an active life - it is not a dull static state of so-called happiness. Full of the burning fire of enthusiasm, anarchic, revolutionary, energetic, daemonic, Dionysian, filled to overflowing with the terrific urge to create - such is the life of the man who risks safety and happiness for the sake of growth and happiness.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation...claims...the "Whole substance" of the wine is converted into the blood of Christ,; the appearance of wine that remains is "merely accidental", "inhering in no substance". Transubstantiation is colloquially taught as meaning that the wine "literally" turns into the blood of Christ. Whether in its obfuscatory Aristotelian or its franker colloquial form, the claim of transubstantiation can be made only if we do serious violence to the normal meanings of words like 'substance' and 'literally'.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My last vestige of "hands-off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11, 2001, followed by the "National Day of Prayer", when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonation and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a 'they' as opposed to a 'we' can be identified at all.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Religion is the most inflammatory enemy-labelling device in history.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is where they come into their own, for there's money in hope: the more desperate the hope, the richer the pickings.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The human mind is a wanton storyteller and even more, a profligate seeker after pattern. We see faces in clouds and tortillas, fortunes in tea leaves and planetary movements. It is quite difficult to prove a real pattern as distinct from a superficial illusion.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is more than just grandeur in this view of life, bleak and cold though it can seem from under the security blanket of ignorance. There is deep refreshment to be had from standing up and facing straight into the strong keen wind of understanding: Yeats's 'Winds that blow through the starry ways'.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Compare: "Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their …
“Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: 'Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?' And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: 'What kind of evidence is there for that?' And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I want to examine that dangerous thing that's common to Judaism and Christianity as well: the process of non-thinking called "faith". (Part 1, 00:00:55)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them? Who's God trying to impress? Presumably himself, since he is judge and jury, as well as execution victim. (Part 2, 00:29:56)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yousef Al-Khattab: When you take the women and dress them like whores, on the street... Richard Dawkins: I don't dress women, they dress themselves... Yousef Al-Khattab: But you allow it as a norm, to let the women go on the street dressed like this. What's going on with your society?”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of course politics are important — Iraq, Palestine, even social deprivation in Bradford. But as we wake up to this huge challenge to our civilised values, don't let's forget the elephant in the room — an elephant called "religion". (Part 1, 00:00:24)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I want to say that killing for God is not only hideous murder — it is also utterly ridiculous. (Part 1, 00:44:39)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And when we look closely, we find a system of morals which any civilised person today should surely find poisonous.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You've just said a very revealing thing. Are you telling me that the only reason you don't steal and rape and murder is that you're frightened of God? (Part 2, 00:13:55)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Part 2: "The Virus of Faith", quoted at "The Proper Study of Mankind" blog on January 25, 2006
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oh, but of course the story of Adam and Eve was only ever symbolic, wasn't it? Symbolic?! So Jesus had himself tortured and executed for a symbolic sin by a non-existent individual? Nobody not brought up in the faith could reach any verdict other than "barking mad". (Part 2, 00:30:25)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was reminded of a quotation by the famous American physicist Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist. Weinberg said: "Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it, you'd have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion". (Part 2, 00:35:01)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thus the creationist's favourite question "What is the use of half an eye?" Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. (p. 31 of the hardcover edition and p. 51 of the paperback edition; see also: Dan Barker, God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, foreword by Richard Dawkins, 2016)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism. (p. 40)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented. (p. 57 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(Spectrum level 6) I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there. (p. 73)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What expertise can theologians bring to deep cosmological questions that scientists cannot? (p. 79)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the Argument from Degree: "That's an argument? You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion." (p. 102)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fact that something is written down is persuasive to people not used to asking questions like: ‘Who wrote it, and when?’ ‘How did they know what to write?’ ‘Did they, in their time really mean what we, in our time, understand them to be saying?’ ‘Were they unbiased observers, or did they have an agenda that coloured their writing?’. (p. 118 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Admittedly, people of a theological bent are often chronically incapable of distinguishing what is true from what they'd like to be true. (p. 135 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the Arguement from Scripture: "Ever since the nineteenth century, scholarly theologians have made an overwhelming case that the gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened in the history of the real world. All were written long after the death of Jesus, and also after the epistles of Paul, which mentioned almost none of the alleged facts of Jesus's life. All were then copied and recopied … by falilible scribes who, in any case, had their own religious agendas." (p. 118)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But there are many unsophisticated Christians out there … who take the Bible very seriously indeed as a literal and accurate record of history and hence as evidence supporting the religious beliefs. Do these people never open the book that they believe is the literal truth? Why don't they notice the glaring contradictions?" (p. 120)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The four Gospels that made it into the official canon were chosen, more or less arbitrarily, out of a larger sample of at least a dozen … The gospels that didn't make it were omitted by those ecclesiastics perhaps because they included stories that were even more embarrassingly implausible than those in the four canonical ones." (p. 121)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is even possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, historical case that Jesus never lived at all … Although Jesus probably existed, reputable biblical scholars do not in general regard the New Testament (and obviously not the Old Testament) as reliable record of what actually happened in history, and I shall not consider the Bible further evidence for any kind of deity." (p. 122)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747" (p. 138)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On natural selection: "Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance." (p. 146)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[...] one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding. (p. 152 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, whereas chance and design both fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so. (p. 153)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right." (p. 178)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the properties of God: "Such a bandwidth! God, who may not have a brain made of neurons, or a CPU made of silicon, but if he has the powers attributed to him he must have something far more elaborately and non-randomly constructed than the largest brain or the largest computer we know." (p. 184)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses. (p. 176)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“More generally (and this applies to Christianity no less than to Islam), what is really pernicious is the practice of teaching children that faith itself is a virtue. Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. Teaching children that unquestioned faith is a virtue primes them - given certain other ingredients that are not hard to come by - to grow up into potentially lethal weapons for future jihads or crusades. (pp. 347-348 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point. [...] The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The word 'mundane' has come to mean boring and dull, and it really shouldn't. It should mean the opposite because it comes from the latin 'mundus', meaning the world, and the world is anything but dull; the world is wonderful. There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: , "Slaves to Superstition" [1.01], 13 August 2007, timecode 00:38:16ff
“Reason has built the modern world. It is a precious but also a fragile thing, which can be corroded by apparently harmless irrationality. We must favor verifiable evidence over private feeling. Otherwise we leave ourselves vulnerable to those who would obscure the truth.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: , "Slaves to Superstition" [1.01], 13 August 2007, timecode 00:46:47ff
“We should be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brain falls out.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: , "The Irrational Health Service" [1.02], 20 August 2007, timecode 00:13:05"ff
“Science replaces private prejudice with publicly verifiable evidence.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source