Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Natural selection is anything but random.”

— Richard Dawkins

52. “Religion is a powerful weapon that can be used because it persuades people to do things. And thus it can be used for good or ill. But it should not be a powerful weapon at all.”

— Richard Dawkins

53. “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara.”

— Richard Dawkins

54. “Science is the disinterested search for the objective truth about the material world.”

— Richard Dawkins

55. “Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.”

— Richard Dawkins

56. “The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.”

— Richard Dawkins

57. “The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the raising of Lazarus, even the Old Testament miracles, all are freely used for religious propaganda, and they are very effective with an audience of unsophisticates and children.”

— Richard Dawkins

58. “Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun.”

— Richard Dawkins

59. “Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.”

— Richard Dawkins

60. “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”

— Richard Dawkins

61. “Genome sequencing has changed taxonomy.”

— Richard Dawkins

62. “It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise.”

— Richard Dawkins

63. “Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.”

— Richard Dawkins

64. “Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.”

— Richard Dawkins

65. “Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. The watchmaker is blind.”

— Richard Dawkins

66. “My thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings are all in my brain. My brain is going to rot.”

— Richard Dawkins

67. “Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.”

— Richard Dawkins

68. “The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals.”

— Richard Dawkins

69. “There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over.”

— Richard Dawkins

70. “There is no reason to regard God as immune from consideration along the spectrum of probabilities. And there is certainly no reason to suppose that, just because God can be neither proved nor disproved, his probability of existence is 50 per cent.”

— Richard Dawkins

71. “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.”

— Richard Dawkins

72. “I don’t understand why so many people who are sophisticated in science go on believing in God. I wish I did.”

— Richard Dawkins

73. “Undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance.”

— Richard Dawkins

74. “Do you advocate the Ten Commandments as a guide to the good life? Then I can only presume that you don’t know the Ten Commandments.”

— Richard Dawkins

75. “Gravity is not a version of the truth. It is the truth. Anyone who doubts it is invited to jump out a tenth-storey window.”

— Richard Dawkins

76. “You can make some inferences about a man’s character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.”

— Richard Dawkins

77. “Let our tribute to the dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe.”

— Richard Dawkins

78. “Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality that would not imply that the theory of evolution was false.”

— Richard Dawkins

79. “I shall not make an argument ad hominem. My argument is ad bullshitem.”

— Richard Dawkins

80. “Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything.”

— Richard Dawkins

81. “You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I’m talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells.”

— Richard Dawkins

82. “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”

— Richard Dawkins

83. “I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn’t a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.”

— Richard Dawkins

84. “I am thrilled to be alive at time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.”

— Richard Dawkins

85. “Writing a computer virus program is child’s play. Any fool can do it, which is why the silly little twerps who do have nothing to be proud of.”

— Richard Dawkins

86. “The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner.”

— Richard Dawkins

87. “Mysteries do not lose their poetry when solved. Quite the contrary; the solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle and, in any case, when you have solved one mystery you uncover others, perhaps to inspire greater poetry.”

— Richard Dawkins

88. “Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.”

— Richard Dawkins

89. “Human beings are just gene machines.”

— Richard Dawkins

90. “Isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?”

— Richard Dawkins

91. “Scientific truth is too beautiful to be sacrificed for the sake of light entertainment or money. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.”

— Richard Dawkins

92. “I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organised ignorance.”

— Richard Dawkins

93. “You believe that all humanity came from Adam and Eve, and humans have not evolved at all since. So tell me; between the two of them, which was black, which was white, and which was Asian?”

— Richard Dawkins

94. “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”

— Richard Dawkins

95. “If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope to eventually understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.”

— Richard Dawkins

96. “I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality – you’re told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.”

— Richard Dawkins

97. “I hate the neologism “owned” for “scored a victory over”. I have no intention of owning anyone, and nobody will ever own me.”

— Richard Dawkins

98. “Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him.”

— Richard Dawkins

99. “I detest ‘Jingle Bells,’ ‘White Christmas,’ ‘Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,’ and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.”

— Richard Dawkins

100. “Regarding the accusations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are, they are not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child Catholic in the first place.”

— Richard Dawkins