Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.”

— Richard Dawkins

152. “Can omniscient God, who Knows the future, find The omnipotence to Change His future mind?”

— Richard Dawkins

153. “The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal.”

— Richard Dawkins

154. “After sleeping through a hundred million centuries, we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life.”

— Richard Dawkins

155. “Just because science can’t in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn’t mean that religion can. It’s a simple and logical fallacy to say, ‘If science can’t do something therefore religion can.’”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

158. “The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling – though not to me.”

— Richard Dawkins

159. “They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.”

— Richard Dawkins

160. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

162. “What’s wrong with being elitist if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive?”

— Richard Dawkins

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

166. “Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.”

— Richard Dawkins

167. “Anybody who objects to cloning on principle has to answer to all the identical twins in the world who might be insulted by the thought that there is something offensive about their very existence. Clones are simply identical twins.”

— Richard Dawkins

168. “Evolution never looks to the future.”

— Richard Dawkins

169. “My love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western countries is betraying itself where Islam is concerned.”

— Richard Dawkins

170. “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think...”

— Richard Dawkins

171. “If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so.”

— Richard Dawkins

172. “You can’t understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can’t recognise biblical allusions.”

— Richard Dawkins

173. “All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

175. “The fear of Hell is a very powerful motivation.”

— Richard Dawkins

176. “Religion is nothing more than a useless and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident. Religious behavior may be a misfiring, an unfortunate byproduct of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful.”

— Richard Dawkins

177. “DNA is ROM. It can be read millions of times over, but only written to once – when it is first assembled the birth of the cell in which it resides.”

— Richard Dawkins

178. “The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans.”

— Richard Dawkins

179. “The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.”

— Richard Dawkins

180. “Humans are just a very, very small part of the panoply of life, and it is arguable that in a certain sense, humans have emancipated themselves from Darwinian selection.”

— Richard Dawkins

181. “Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn’t mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence.”

— Richard Dawkins

182. “We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully ‘designed’ to have come into existence by chance.”

— Richard Dawkins

183. “I am not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where facts are concerned.”

— Richard Dawkins

184. “Science is wonderful, science is important, and so are children, so are young people, and so what could be better than to write a science book for young people?”

— Richard Dawkins

185. “Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether they are ‘valid,’ let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so.”

— Richard Dawkins

186. “Philosophy and the subjects known as ‘humanities’ are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived.”

— Richard Dawkins

187. “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

188. “If I’d been born in ancient Greece, I’d worship Zeus and Aphrodite.”

— Richard Dawkins

189. “Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.”

— Richard Dawkins

190. “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

191. “The body is a survival machine programmed to propagate the genes that reside inside it.”

— Richard Dawkins

192. “My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a “they” as opposed to a “we” can be identified at all.”

— Richard Dawkins

193. “Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous.”

— Richard Dawkins

194. “Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.”

— Richard Dawkins

195. “I like to think ‘The God Delusion’ is a humorous book. I think, actually, it’s full of laughs. And people who describe it as a polarizing book or as an aggressive book, it’s just that very often they haven’t read it.”

— Richard Dawkins

196. “The feature of living matter that most demands explanation is that it is almost unimaginably complicated in directions that convey a powerful illusion of deliberate design.”

— Richard Dawkins

197. “Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.”

— Richard Dawkins

198. “Unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop being true.”

— Richard Dawkins

199. “It is possible in medicine, even when you intend to do good, to do harm instead. That is why science thrives on actively encouraging criticism rather than stifling it.”

— Richard Dawkins

200. “God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.”

— Richard Dawkins