Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.”

— Richard Dawkins

302. “But, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive.”

— Richard Dawkins

303. “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

304. “If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, authority, revelation or faith, they will automatically work out for themselves that they are atheists.”

— Richard Dawkins

305. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

308. “Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that’s because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.”

— Richard Dawkins

309. “Replicators may be classified in two ways. They may be ‘active’ or ‘passive’, and, cutting across this classification, they may be ‘germ-line’ or ‘dead-end’ replicators.”

— Richard Dawkins

310. “I think we certainly benefit from social institutions which encourage us towards moral behavior. It’s very important to have law. It’s very important to have a moral education.”

— Richard Dawkins

311. “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

312. “Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

315. “What has ‘theology’ ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has ‘theology’ ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? What makes you think that ‘theology’ is a subject at all?”

— Richard Dawkins

316. “Religious people split into three main groups when faced with science. I shall label them the “know-nothings”, the “know-alls”, and the “no-contests.””

— Richard Dawkins

317. “I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

319. “Having a debate with a modern Christian is like punching a sponge.”

— Richard Dawkins

320. “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

321. “The very idea that grand conclusions could follow from such logomachist trickery offends me aesthetically, so I must take care to refrain from bandying words like ‘fool’.”

— Richard Dawkins

322. “If you divide Christians into denominations, agnostics and atheists come in third, behind Catholics and Baptists. That’s interesting when you contrast it with the lack of influence of nonbelievers.”

— Richard Dawkins

323. “If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle.”

— Richard Dawkins

324. “Even if religion did no other harm in itself, its wanton and carefully nurtured divisiveness – its deliberate and cultivated pandering to humanity’s natural tendency to favour in-groups and shun out-groups – would be enough to make it a significant force for evil in the world.”

— Richard Dawkins

325. “If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine.”

— Richard Dawkins

326. “I love romantic poetry.”

— Richard Dawkins

327. “Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.”

— Richard Dawkins

328. “It is raining DNA outside.”

— Richard Dawkins

329. “I think what attracts me about the Electric Monk is that it’s such an eloquent example of the futility of belief for belief’s sake. I mean there’s only any point in believing something if it’s true.”

— Richard Dawkins

330. “Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think that the Universe began after the domestication of the dog?”

— Richard Dawkins

331. “An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles – except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don’t yet understand. If.”

— Richard Dawkins

332. “As a child, my wife hated her school and wished she could leave. Years later, when she was in her twenties, she disclosed this unhappy fact to her parents, and her mother was aghast: ‘But darling, why didn’t you come to us and tell us?’ Lalla’s reply is my text for today: ‘But I didn’t know I could.”

— Richard Dawkins

333. “If you need a geography lesson in order to know where Africa is – if, by age seventeen, you have somehow failed to imbibe such knowledge by osmosis or simple curiosity – you surely don’t have the sort of mind that would benefit from a university education.”

— Richard Dawkins

334. “As for the next nearest star, Proxima Centauri, if you look at it in 2012, what you are seeing is happening in 2008.”

— Richard Dawkins

335. “If your plane is being hijacked by an armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants to go on living, there is room for bargaining.”

— Richard Dawkins

336. “Your family tree includes not just obvious cousins like chimpanzees and monkeys but also mice, buffaloes, iguanas, wallabies, snails, dandelions, golden eagles, mushrooms, whales, wombats and bacteria. All are our cousins. Every last one of them. Isn’t that a far more wonderful thought than any myth?”

— Richard Dawkins

337. “It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.”

— Richard Dawkins

338. “Evolution normally does not come to a halt, but constantly ‘tracks’ the changing environment.”

— Richard Dawkins

339. “Our subjective judgment of what seems like a good bet is irrelevant to what is actually a good bet.”

— Richard Dawkins

340. “Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where’s the harm? September 11th changed all that.”

— Richard Dawkins

341. “Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life’s hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don’t; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions.”

— Richard Dawkins

342. “Indeed, to claim a supernatural explanation of something is not to explain it at all and, even worse, to rule out any possibility of its ever being explained.”

— Richard Dawkins

343. “We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination.”

— Richard Dawkins

344. “Reductionism is a dirty word, and a kind of ‘holistier than thou’ self-righteousness has become fashionable.”

— Richard Dawkins

345. “Matthew and Luke handle the problem differently, by deciding that Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem after all. But they get him there by different routes.”

— Richard Dawkins

346. “Nature is a miserly accountant, grudging the pennies, watching the clock, punishing the smallest extravagance.”

— Richard Dawkins

347. “They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.”

— Richard Dawkins

348. “What are all of us but self-reproducing robots? We have been put together by our genes and what we do is roam the world looking for a way to sustain ourselves and ultimately produce another robot child.”

— Richard Dawkins

349. “Religion is a distraction from true education.”

— Richard Dawkins

350. “I guess there are some rights of parents with what they choose their children to learn, but I’m biased in favor of freeing children to learn and not letting parents be too doctrinaire in indoctrinating their children.”

— Richard Dawkins