Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

261. “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

262. “Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose. Accounts of Jesus’s resurrection and ascension are about as well-documented as Jack and the Beanstalk.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

266. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

273. “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

274. “I mean, in a way, I feel that one of the reasons for learning about Darwinian evolution is as an object lesson in how not to set up our values and social lives.”

— Richard Dawkins

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

278. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

280. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

287. “When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.”

— Richard Dawkins

288. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

290. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

293. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

300. “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