Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

208. “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

209. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

211. “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

212. “Have they discovered evolution yet?”

— Richard Dawkins

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

220. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

225. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

229. “Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men – above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends. – ALBERT EINSTEIN.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

249. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins