Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Atheism is not a religion. Abstinence is not a sex position.”

— Richard Dawkins

252. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

254. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

268. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

270. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

273. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “Carl Sagan was proud to be agnostic when asked whether there was life elsewhere in the universe. When he refused to commit himself, his interlocutor pressed him for a ‘gut feeling’ and he immortally replied: ‘But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins