Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.”

— Richard Dawkins

103. “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life.’ It is information, words, instructions... If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.”

— Richard Dawkins

104. “The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.”

— Richard Dawkins

105. “There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.”

— Richard Dawkins

106. “The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened.”

— Richard Dawkins

107. “More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.”

— Richard Dawkins

108. “Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it.”

— Richard Dawkins

109. “I’m a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims.”

— Richard Dawkins

110. “Bad things happen because things happen.”

— Richard Dawkins

111. “Do you really mean the only reason you try to be good is to gain God’s approval and reward? That’s not morality, that’s just sucking up.”

— Richard Dawkins

112. “Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it...”

— Richard Dawkins

113. “I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.”

— Richard Dawkins

114. “Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different senses.”

— Richard Dawkins

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115. “The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, nor an eight-level code as in some telephone systems, but a quaternary code with four symbols. The machine code of the genes is uncannily computerlike.”

— Richard Dawkins

116. “We should take astrology seriously. No, I don’t mean we should believe in it. I am talking about fighting it seriously instead of humouring it as a piece of harmless fun.”

— Richard Dawkins

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117. “The Hopi tribe of North America had a goddess called Spider Woman. In their creation myth she teamed up with Tawa the sun god, and they sang the First Magic Song as a duet. This song brought the Earth, and life, into being. Spider Woman then took the threads of Tawa’s thoughts and wove them into solid form, creating fish, birds, and all other animals.”

— Richard Dawkins

118. “Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.”

— Richard Dawkins

119. “Many people want to send their children to faith schools because they get good exam results, but they’re not foolish enough to believe that it’s because of faith that they get good exam results.”

— Richard Dawkins

120. “Offense is what people take when they can’t take argument.”

— Richard Dawkins

121. “For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.”

— Richard Dawkins

122. “Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it’s a time for reflection, a time for memory, a time for regret.”

— Richard Dawkins

123. “Society bends over backward to be accommodating to religious sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities. If I say something offensive to religious people, I’ll be universally censured, including by many atheists.”

— Richard Dawkins

124. “Two religions cannot both be right, because they contradict each other, yet they can both be wrong.”

— Richard Dawkins

125. “As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers.”

— Richard Dawkins

126. “Not only is science corrosive to religion, but religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp.”

— Richard Dawkins

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127. “Evolution has been observed. It’s just that it hasn’t been observed while it’s happening.”

— Richard Dawkins

128. “Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.”

— Richard Dawkins

129. “The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.”

— Richard Dawkins

130. “I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous ideas.”

— Richard Dawkins

131. “Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.”

— Richard Dawkins

132. “Segregation has no place in the education system.”

— Richard Dawkins

133. “In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

— Richard Dawkins

134. “The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.”

— Richard Dawkins

135. “Organizing atheists is a bit like herding cats; They are on the whole too intelligent and independent minded to lend themselves to being herded.”

— Richard Dawkins

136. “People who believe the earth was created 6000 years ago, when it’s actually 4.5 billion years old, should also believe the width of North America is 8 yards. That is the scale of the error.”

— Richard Dawkins

137. “I am utterly fed up with the respect we have been brainwashed into bestowing upon religion.”

— Richard Dawkins

138. “Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.”

— Richard Dawkins

139. “Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once.”

— Richard Dawkins

140. “We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes.”

— Richard Dawkins

141. “Everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god – from Ra to Shiva – in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in.”

— Richard Dawkins

142. “If I were God wanting to make a human being, I would do it by a more direct way rather than by evolution. Why deliberately set it up in the one way which makes it look as though you don’t exist?”

— Richard Dawkins

143. “Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur’an. You don’t have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about Nazism.”

— Richard Dawkins

144. “The cynic about human nature might say that religious morality is an effective way of keeping people in line. The threat of hell, the reward of heaven, but the rules of the holy books are out of date and often barbaric.”

— Richard Dawkins

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145. “It’s an important point to realize that the genetic programming of our lives is not fully deterministic. It is statistical – it is in any animal merely statistical – not deterministic.”

— Richard Dawkins

146. “My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.”

— Richard Dawkins

147. “THE MAJORITY of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all.”

— Richard Dawkins

148. “There’s no point of having faith if you have evidence.”

— Richard Dawkins

149. “When we talk about genes for anything, like a gene for being gay or a gene for being aggressive or something of that sort, that a gene for anything may not have been a gene for that thing under different environmental conditions.”

— Richard Dawkins

150. “The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist.”

— Richard Dawkins