Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

106. “It is immoral to brand children with religion. ‘This is a Catholic child.’ ‘That is a Muslim child.’ I want everyone to flinch when they hear such a phrase, just as they would if they heard, ‘That is a Marxist child.’”

— Richard Dawkins

107. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

116. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

118. “Bad things happen because things happen.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

127. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

136. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

139. “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

140. “Being an atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily, and fully.”

— Richard Dawkins

141. “I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will.”

— Richard Dawkins

142. “Rather than propose a new theory or unearth a new fact, often the most important contribution a scientist can make is to discover a new way of seeing old theories or facts.”

— Richard Dawkins

143. “Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact... That didn’t have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn’t. It didn’t have to be true, but it is... Evolution is the only game in town, the greatest show on earth.”

— Richard Dawkins

144. “It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe.”

— Richard Dawkins

145. “My computer is a very complex gadget and it was designed by many designers, so why must the universe have only a single designer and not many designers?”

— Richard Dawkins

146. “Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle.”

— Richard Dawkins

147. “Religious people are atheists about all other gods, atheists only take it one god further.”

— Richard Dawkins

148. “My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.”

— Richard Dawkins

149. “I great difficulty having any respect for a religion that has so little confidence in the truth of its beliefs that it feels reduced to using threats in order to propagate those beliefs.”

— Richard Dawkins

150. “Value the future on a timescale longer than your own.”

— Richard Dawkins