Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

204. “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

205. “Public sharing is an important part of science.”

— Richard Dawkins

206. “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

207. “I am not absolutely positive there is no god. Only in the sense that I’m not absolutely positive there is no large china teapot in orbit in the solar system.”

— Richard Dawkins

208. “Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.”

— Richard Dawkins

209. “I do sometimes accuse people of ignorance, but that is not intended to be an insult. I’m ignorant of lots of things. Ignorance is something that can be remedied by education.”

— Richard Dawkins

210. “Each one of us is a city of cells, and each cell a town of bacteria. You are a gigantic megalopolis of bacteria.”

— Richard Dawkins

211. “Nothing is wrong with peace and love. It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ’s followers seem to disagree.”

— Richard Dawkins

212. “Have they discovered evolution yet?”

— Richard Dawkins

213. “American political opportunities are loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.”

— Richard Dawkins

214. “I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine.”

— Richard Dawkins

215. “Beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture, they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution.”

— Richard Dawkins

216. “Let us understand Darwinism so we can walk in the opposite direction when it comes to setting up society.”

— Richard Dawkins

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

221. “I’m pretty sure there is some genetic component towards intelligence.”

— Richard Dawkins

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

227. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture, rightly observed.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

235. “We can’t prove anything in science. But the best that scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried.”

— Richard Dawkins

236. “Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

238. “As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.”

— Richard Dawkins

239. “God, in the sense defined, is a delusion; and, as later chapters will show, a pernicious delusion.”

— Richard Dawkins

240. “The flagellar motor of bacteria is a prodigy of human nature. It drives the only known example outside of human technology of a freely rotating axle.”

— Richard Dawkins

241. “There is mystery but never magic, and mysteries are all the more beautiful for being eventually explained. Things are explicable and it is our privilege to explain them.”

— Richard Dawkins

242. “When asked wether I am an atheist, I find it an amusing strategy to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.”

— Richard Dawkins

243. “The gene is a long-lived replicator, existing in the form of many duplicate copies. It is not infinitely long-lived. Even a diamond is not literally everlasting, and even a cistron can be cut in two by crossing-over. The gene is defined as a piece of chromosome which is sufficiently short for it to last, potentially, for long enough for it to function as a significant unit of natural selection.”

— Richard Dawkins

244. “It is fundamental to the idea of a replicator that when a mistake or ‘mutation’ does occur it is passed on to future copies: the mutation brings into existence a new kind of replicator which ‘breeds true’ until there is a further mutation.”

— Richard Dawkins

245. “A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents.”

— Richard Dawkins

246. “The word replicator is purposely defined in a general way, so that it does not even have to refer to DNA.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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