Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “I personally would consider it to be an honour to be fossilized.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

453. “I don’t think God is an explanation at all. It’s simply redescribing the problem.”

— Richard Dawkins

454. “Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution?”

— Richard Dawkins

455. “One way to express the answer is that it might happen by ‘chance’. But ‘chance’ is just a word expressing ignorance. It means ‘determined by some as yet unknown, or unspecified, means’.”

— Richard Dawkins

456. “Commonsense lets us down, because commonsense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large; the mundane world of the familiar.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

458. “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

459. “We’ve all been brought up with the view that religion has some kind of special privileged status. You’re not allowed to criticise it.”

— Richard Dawkins

460. “The book is true, and if evidence seems to condtradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out not the book.”

— Richard Dawkins

461. “The Darwinian theory is in principle capable of explaining life. No other theory that has ever been suggested is in principle capable of explaining life.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

463. “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

464. “I can remember at the age of about six being fascinated by the planets and learning all about Mars and Venus and things.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

467. “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

468. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

470. “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

471. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

474. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

490. “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

491. “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

492. “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

493. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

495. “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

496. “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

497. “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

498. “To suggest that the first cause, the great unknown which is responsible for something existing rather than nothing, is a being capable of designing the universe and of talking to a million people simultaneously, is a total abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation. It is a dreadful exhibition of self-indulgent, thought denying skyhookery.”

— Richard Dawkins

499. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins