Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “A gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness.”

— Richard Dawkins

202. “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

203. “The obvious objections to the execution of Saddam Hussein are valid and well aired. His death will provoke violent strife between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and between Iraqis in general and the American occupation forces.”

— Richard Dawkins

204. “I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody is too polite – or too devout – to notice: religion, and specifically the devaluing effect that religion has on human life.”

— Richard Dawkins

205. “Have they discovered evolution yet?”

— Richard Dawkins

206. “The efforts of apologists to find genuinely distinguished modern scientists who are religious have an air of desperation, generating the unmistakably hollow sound or bottoms of barrels being scraped.”

— Richard Dawkins

207. “We should always be open-minded, but the only good reason to believe that something exists is if there is real evidence that it does.”

— Richard Dawkins

208. “All animals are minor variations on a very particular theme.”

— Richard Dawkins

209. “I am very hostile to religion because it is enormously dominant, especially in American life. And I don’t buy the argument that, well, it’s harmless. I think it is harmful, partly because I care passionately about what’s true.”

— Richard Dawkins

210. “There is absolutely no reason to believe that those things for which science does not yet have natural explanations will turn out to be of supernatural origin, any more than volcanoes or earthquakes or diseases turn out to be caused by angry deities, as people once believed they were. Of.”

— Richard Dawkins

211. “I find that religion really does motivate people to do horrible things because they have this passionate faith in whatever their religion happens to be, and it teaches them that the other religion is the wrong one.”

— Richard Dawkins

212. “False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment.”

— Richard Dawkins

213. “All religious beliefs seem weird to people not brought up in them.”

— Richard Dawkins

214. “Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.”

— Richard Dawkins

215. “A gene is defined as any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection.”

— Richard Dawkins

216. “I think what I’d really like to see would be a mass consciousness-raising movement so that we would all become vegetarian.”

— Richard Dawkins

217. “The American comedian Cathy Ladman observes that ‘All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.”

— Richard Dawkins

218. “Martin Rees, in Just Six Numbers, lists six fundamental constants, which are believed to hold all around the universe.”

— Richard Dawkins

219. “I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist.”

— Richard Dawkins

220. “Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.”

— Richard Dawkins

221. “When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

224. “The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.”

— Richard Dawkins

225. “We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can’t disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we can’t disprove, we can say that God is very, very improbable.”

— Richard Dawkins

226. “We don’t need fossils – the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution.”

— Richard Dawkins

227. “We have this one life, let’s enjoy it, let’s live it to the full and don’t get so worked up about don’t identify yourself so passionately with this business called religion.”

— Richard Dawkins

228. “Cloning may be good and it may be bad. Probably it’s a bit of both. The question must not be greeted with reflex hysteria but decided quietly, soberly and on its own merits. We need less emotion and more thought.”

— Richard Dawkins

229. “You cannot be both sane and well educated and disbelieve in evolution. The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person has got to believe in evolution.”

— Richard Dawkins

230. “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

231. “I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden.”

— Richard Dawkins

232. “The God of the Old testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction...”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

234. “Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next.”

— Richard Dawkins

235. “Being dead will be no different from being unborn – I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There is nothing to fear in that.”

— Richard Dawkins

236. “A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.”

— Richard Dawkins

237. “I will not utter falsehoods but I have no objection to making meaningless statements.”

— Richard Dawkins

238. “It is a virtue to admit ignorance when you don’t know, but not to wallow in ignorance as an end in itself. People say if we don’t believe god is watching over us, we abandon morality. Are they right?”

— Richard Dawkins

239. “What I can’t understand is why you can’t see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing – that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?”

— Richard Dawkins

240. “I am not advocating a morality based on evolution.”

— Richard Dawkins

241. “The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.”

— Richard Dawkins

242. “We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude the He is very, very improbable indeed.”

— Richard Dawkins

243. “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

244. “If you don’t know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.”

— Richard Dawkins

245. “Discrimination is not liberal. Arguing against discrimination is not intolerance.”

— Richard Dawkins

246. “If you have Mozart to listen to, why would you need God?”

— Richard Dawkins

247. “Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when.”

— Richard Dawkins

248. “I mean it as a compliment when I say that you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won’t take common sense for an answer.”

— Richard Dawkins

249. “Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?”

— Richard Dawkins

250. “The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something.”

— Richard Dawkins