Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “I didn’t have a very starry school career, I was medium to above average, nothing special.”

— Richard Dawkins

452. “I should have been put down at birth.”

— Richard Dawkins

453. “My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.”

— Richard Dawkins

454. “All the Founding Fathers, whatever their private religious beliefs, would have been aghast to read the journalist Robert Sherman’s report of George Bush Senior’s answer when Sherman asked him whether he recognized the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists: ‘No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.”

— Richard Dawkins

455. “I sympathize with politicians who have to watch every syllable they utter for fear it will be misused by somebody with an agenda.”

— Richard Dawkins

456. “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

457. “I do understand people when they say that you destroy the magic of childhood if you encourage too much skeptical questioning.”

— Richard Dawkins

458. “I personally would consider it to be an honour to be fossilized.”

— Richard Dawkins

459. “I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like ‘Catholic children’ or ‘Protestant children’ or ‘Islamic children.’”

— Richard Dawkins

460. “There’s nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don’t want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.”

— Richard Dawkins

461. “You can’t statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you’re still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing.”

— Richard Dawkins

462. “The best scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried.”

— Richard Dawkins

463. “The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

465. “Religion is the most inflammatory enemy-labelling device in history.”

— Richard Dawkins

466. “The thing that defines a species is that all members have the same addressing system for their DNA.”

— Richard Dawkins

467. “In a designed economy there would be no trees, or certainly no very tall trees: no forests, no canopy. Trees are a waste. Trees are extravagant. Tree trunks are standing monuments to futile competition – futile if we think in terms of a planed economy. But the natural economy is not planned. Individual plants compete with other plants, of the same and other species, and the result is that they grow taller and taller, far taller than any planner would recommend.”

— Richard Dawkins

468. “Atheists are the new gays; in the closet and pretty much disqualified from public office.”

— Richard Dawkins

469. “Religious organisations have an automatic tax-free charitable status.”

— Richard Dawkins

470. “My decision to be a scientist was a bit of a drift really, more or less by default.”

— Richard Dawkins

471. “You can’t imagine how gratifying it is to have a reader come up to you and say, ‘You changed my life.’”

— Richard Dawkins

472. “There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism .”

— Richard Dawkins

473. “Goodness is no part of the definition of the God Hypothesis, merely a desirable add-on.”

— Richard Dawkins

474. “Voltaire got it right long ago: ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

— Richard Dawkins

475. “In the farsighted words of Thomas Jefferson, writing to his predecessor, John Adams, ‘The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”

— Richard Dawkins

476. “We have to find our own purposes in life, which are not derived directly from our scientific history.”

— Richard Dawkins

477. “At least the fundamentalists haven’t tried to dilute their message. Their faith is exposed for what it is for all to see.”

— Richard Dawkins

478. “It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr’s death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.”

— Richard Dawkins

479. “Natural selection is a strong enough theory to be predictive in this fashion, now that science no longer needs convincing of its truth.”

— Richard Dawkins

480. “Why did it take so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene? What delayed humanity’s tumbling to that luminously simple idea which seems, on the face of it, so much easier to grasp than the mathematical ideas given us by Newton two centuries earlier – or, indeed, by Archimedes two millennia earlier?”

— Richard Dawkins

481. “We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don’t think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we’re forever condemned to be irrational.”

— Richard Dawkins

482. “Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature.”

— Richard Dawkins

483. “I’m sure Obama is an atheist, I’m sure Kennedy was an atheist, but I doubt if Pope Frank is.”

— Richard Dawkins

484. “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 Pascal’s wager. 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

485. “John Stuart Mill was already able to say: ‘The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion.”

— Richard Dawkins

486. “Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing – a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe.”

— Richard Dawkins

487. “It’s known that stress gives rise to disease. It’s also known that many diseases, especially stress-related diseases, can be cured by placebos – pills that have no medicinal effect, but people think they do, and so they do.”

— Richard Dawkins

488. “Despite the Great Chain of Being’s traditional ranking of humans between animals and angels, there is no evolutionary justification for the common assumption that evolution is somehow ‘aimed’ at humans, or that humans are ‘evolution’s last word’.”

— Richard Dawkins

489. “Natural selection is an improbability pump: a process that generates the statistically improbable. It systematically seizes the minority of random changes that have what it takes to survive, and accumulates them, step by tiny step over unimaginable timescales, until evolution eventually climbs mountains of improbability and diversity, peaks whose height and range seem to know no limit, the metaphorical mountain that I have called ‘Mount Improbable’.”

— Richard Dawkins

490. “If your pet is dying in pain, you will be condemned for cruelty if you do not summon the vet to give him a general anaesthetic from which he will not come round. But if your doctor performs exactly the same merciful service for you when you are dying in pain, he runs the risk of being prosecuted for murder.”

— Richard Dawkins

491. “It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests.”

— Richard Dawkins

492. “A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!”

— Richard Dawkins

493. “There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another.”

— Richard Dawkins

494. “The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain.”

— Richard Dawkins

495. “The American biblical scholar Bart Ehrman, in a book whose subtitle is The Story Behind Who Changed the New Testament and Why, unfolds the huge uncertainty befogging the New Testament texts.”

— Richard Dawkins

496. “My purpose is to examine the biology of selfishness and altruism.”

— Richard Dawkins

497. “To say that something happened supernaturally is not just to say ‘We don’t understand it’ but to say ‘We will never understand it, so don’t even try.”

— Richard Dawkins

498. “The fact that we slowly apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discover it, should not subtract from its wonder.”

— Richard Dawkins

499. “Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God’s approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That’s not morality, that’s just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though.”

— Richard Dawkins

500. “There is much that we are unsure about in science. Where science scores over alternative world views is that we know our uncertainty, we can often measure its magnitude, and we work optimistically to reduce it.”

— Richard Dawkins