Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “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

452. “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

453. “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

454. “If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers.”

— Richard Dawkins

455. “Religion’s power to console doesn’t make it true. Even if we make a huge concession; even if it were conclusively demonstrated that belief in God’s existence is completely essential to human psychological and emotional well-being; even if all atheists were despairing neurotics driven to suicide by relentless cosmic angst – none of this would contribute the tiniest jot or tittle of evidence that religious belief is true. It.”

— Richard Dawkins

456. “Why, I can’t help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking after himself.”

— Richard Dawkins

457. “If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there’s something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.”

— Richard Dawkins

458. “If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have to look.”

— Richard Dawkins

459. “All qualified physicists, biologists, cosmologists and geologists agree, on the basis of massive, mutually corroborating evidence, that the earth’s age is at least four billion years.”

— Richard Dawkins

460. “The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation.”

— Richard Dawkins

461. “One gene may be regarded as a unit that survives through a large number of successive individual bodies.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

463. “You can never be absolutely certain that anything doesn’t exist. But you can show that it’s unlikely.”

— Richard Dawkins

464. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

467. “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

468. “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

469. “Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

471. “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

472. “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

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

478. “My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.’ We clapped our hands red. No fundamentalist would ever say that. In practice, not all scientists would.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

481. “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

482. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

484. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

488. “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

489. “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

490. “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

491. “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

492. “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

493. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

496. “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

497. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins