Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Science is the poetry of reality.”

— Richard Dawkins

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2. “The less you think, the more you believe.”

— Richard Dawkins

Featured in: Quotes About Believing, Doubt Quotes

3. “Faith is belief without evidence and reason; coincidentally that’s also the definition of delusion.”

— Richard Dawkins

4. “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”

— Richard Dawkins

Featured in: Study Quotes, Science Quotes

5. “Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.”

— Richard Dawkins

6. “Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.”

— Richard Dawkins

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7. “Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins.”

— Richard Dawkins

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8. “I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”

— Richard Dawkins

9. “We’re going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.”

— Richard Dawkins

10. “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

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11. “It is a remarkable coincidence that almost everyone has the same religion as their parents and it always just so happens they’re the right religion.”

— Richard Dawkins

12. “Scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit.”

— Richard Dawkins

Featured in: Science Quotes

13. “Religion: Together we can find the cure.”

— Richard Dawkins

14. “Don’t ask God to cure cancer and world poverty. He’s too busy finding you a parking space and fixing the weather for your barbecue.”

— Richard Dawkins

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15. “Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime.”

— Richard Dawkins

16. “By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.”

— Richard Dawkins

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17. “If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it.”

— Richard Dawkins

18. “The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.”

— Richard Dawkins

19. “The Universe does not owe us meaning.”

— Richard Dawkins

20. “Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.”

— Richard Dawkins

21. “Science is interesting, and if you don’t agree, you can f**k off.”

— Richard Dawkins

22. “Religion is the root of quite a lot of evil.”

— Richard Dawkins

23. “The world and the universe are extremely beautiful places, and the more we understand about them the more beautiful they appear.”

— Richard Dawkins

Featured in: Science Quotes

24. “Creationism: God’s gift to the ignorant.”

— Richard Dawkins

25. “In the beginning was simplicity.”

— Richard Dawkins

Featured in: Simplicity Quotes

26. “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.”

— Richard Dawkins

27. “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

28. “A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence.”

— Richard Dawkins

29. “How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.”

— Richard Dawkins

30. “You can’t even begin to understand biology, you can’t understand life, unless you understand what it’s all there for, how it arose – and that means evolution.”

— Richard Dawkins

31. “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

— Richard Dawkins

32. “Evolution is just a theory? Well, so is gravity and I don’t see you jumping out of buildings.”

— Richard Dawkins

33. “Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.”

— Richard Dawkins

34. “Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.”

— Richard Dawkins

35. “There is an attitude in the culture that says that everybody is entitled to their opinion. You got to respect their opinion. No, you damn well haven’t got to respect their opinion.”

— Richard Dawkins

36. “Let’s get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering.”

— Richard Dawkins

37. “We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”

— Richard Dawkins

38. “The idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe.”

— Richard Dawkins

39. “It has been convincingly demonstrated that countries where there are high rates of poverty, or high rates of economic inequality, are the countries with the highest rates of religious beliefs.”

— Richard Dawkins

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40. “The evidence for evolution is so compelling that the only way to save the creation theory is to assume that God deliberately planted enormous quantities of evidence to make it look as if evolution had happened.”

— Richard Dawkins

41. “Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won’t know it, and may even vigorously deny it.”

— Richard Dawkins

42. “The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics.”

— Richard Dawkins

43. “Some people find clarity threatening. They like muddle, confusion, obscurity. So when somebody does no more than speak clearly it sounds threatening.”

— Richard Dawkins

44. “DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”

— Richard Dawkins

45. “Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

— Richard Dawkins

46. “If there is a God, it’s going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.”

— Richard Dawkins

47. “Something pretty mysterious had to give rise to the origin of the universe.”

— Richard Dawkins

48. “You don’t believe that the Earth is round only if you’re an astronaut. You don’t believe Napoleon existed only if you’re a historian. You believe these things because they’re facts, proved by evidence.”

— Richard Dawkins

49. “The truth is more magical – in the best and most exciting sense of the word – than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.”

— Richard Dawkins

50. “Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.”

— Richard Dawkins