Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “What you cannot have is a gene that sacrifices itself for the benefit of other genes. What you can have is a gene that makes organisms sacrifice themselves for other organisms under the influence of selfish genes.”

— Richard Dawkins

252. “When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn’t put too much emphasis on the word ‘just.’ There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.”

— Richard Dawkins

253. “Atheism is not a religion. Abstinence is not a sex position.”

— Richard Dawkins

254. “The very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible. Not only should we not get our moral compass from religion, as a matter of fact we don’t.”

— Richard Dawkins

255. “Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.”

— Richard Dawkins

256. “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

257. “Along with William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin is Britain’s greatest gift to the world. He was our greatest thinker.”

— Richard Dawkins

258. “Effective searching procedures become, when the search-space is sufficiently large, indistinguishable from true creativity.”

— Richard Dawkins

259. “If we say that religion is a virus, then why isn’t science a virus?”

— Richard Dawkins

260. “We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe.”

— Richard Dawkins

261. “No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch.”

— Richard Dawkins

262. “Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: ‘When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.”

— Richard Dawkins

263. “It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that if Darwinism was really a theory of chance, it could not work.”

— Richard Dawkins

264. “The universe doesn’t owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn’t owe us a nice warm feeling inside.”

— Richard Dawkins

265. “The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially, the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer.”

— Richard Dawkins

266. “It’s very important to try to inculcate into children moral rules, such as “do as you would be done by.””

— Richard Dawkins

267. “The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is Enough! Religious faith discourages independent thought, it’s divisive and it’s dangerous.”

— Richard Dawkins

268. “I once wrote that anybody who believes the world is only 6,000 years old is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.”

— Richard Dawkins

269. “At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes.”

— Richard Dawkins

270. “If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it’s not supernatural.”

— Richard Dawkins

271. “Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.”

— Richard Dawkins

272. “Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.”

— Richard Dawkins

273. “A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.”

— Richard Dawkins

274. “Next time that somebody tells you something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.”

— Richard Dawkins

275. “Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang, but interposing an outside intelligence does nothing to add to that knowledge, as we still know nothing about the creation of that intelligence.”

— Richard Dawkins

276. “As Einstein said, ‘If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.”

— Richard Dawkins

277. “As J. B. S. Haldane said when asked what evidence might contradict evolution, ‘Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.”

— Richard Dawkins

278. “There may be some deep questions about the cosmos that are forever beyond science. The mistake is to think they are therefore not beyond religion too.”

— Richard Dawkins

279. “A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet.”

— Richard Dawkins

280. “The odd thing about tradition is, the longer it’s been going, the more people seem to take it seriously – as though sheer passage of time makes something which to begin with was just made up, turns it into what people believe as a fact.”

— Richard Dawkins

281. “I’ve never heard of William Craig. A debate with him might look good on his resume, but it wouldn’t look good on mine!”

— Richard Dawkins

282. “Sometimes I think it’s possible to mistake desire for clarity and talking in a no-nonsense way for aggression.”

— Richard Dawkins

283. “I should also give some space to Amotz Zahavi’s idea that altruistic donation might be a ‘Potlatch’ style of dominance signal: see how superior to you I am, I can afford to make a donation to you!”

— Richard Dawkins

284. “I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca-or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of Kyoto or, of course, the Buddhas of Bamiyan.”

— Richard Dawkins

285. “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

286. “There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can’t prove that there aren’t any, so shouldn’t we be agnostic with respect to fairies?”

— Richard Dawkins

287. “Alister McGrath has now written two books with my name in the title. The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, ’was there ever dog that praised his fleas?”

— Richard Dawkins

288. “When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.”

— Richard Dawkins

289. “Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.”

— Richard Dawkins

290. “We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us – through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology – that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.”

— Richard Dawkins

291. “If any remedy is tested under controlled scientific conditions and proved to be effective, it will cease to be alternative and will simply become medicine. So-called alternative medicine either hasn’t been tested or it has failed its tests.”

— Richard Dawkins

292. “Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory, we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.”

— Richard Dawkins

293. “You can’t blame science for being used for evil purposes. What you can do is say, ‘This is an exceedingly powerful tool.’ And you want to make sure it is used for good purposes, not bad ones. That is a political decision.”

— Richard Dawkins

294. “Myths are fun, as long as you don’t confuse them with the truth.”

— Richard Dawkins

295. “The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.”

— Richard Dawkins

296. “A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right.”

— Richard Dawkins

297. “All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.”

— Richard Dawkins

298. “The physicist’s problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist’s problem is the problem of complexity.”

— Richard Dawkins

299. “I don’t feel depressed. I feel elated.”

— Richard Dawkins

300. “All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.”

— Richard Dawkins