Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

303. “I love romantic poetry.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

315. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

317. “It is raining DNA outside.”

— Richard Dawkins

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

331. “If people think God is interesting, the onus is on them to show that there is anything there to talk about. Otherwise they should just shut up about it.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

333. “Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards.”

— Richard Dawkins

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

338. “Two religions cannot both be right, because they contradict each other, yet they can both be wrong.”

— Richard Dawkins

339. “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

340. “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.”

— Richard Dawkins

341. “We are digital archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas; walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsated by the wonder of it.”

— Richard Dawkins

342. “I’m pretty sure there is some genetic component towards intelligence.”

— Richard Dawkins

343. “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

344. “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

345. “If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.”

— Richard Dawkins

346. “People really, really hate their religion being criticized. It’s as though you’ve said they had an ugly face; they seem to identify personally with it.”

— Richard Dawkins

347. “The Bishop goes on to the human eye, asking rhetorically, and with the implication that there is no answer, ‘How could an organ so complex evolve?’ This is not an argument, it is simply an affirmation of incredulity.”

— Richard Dawkins

348. “The fact that somebody does good doesn’t make their beliefs true.”

— Richard Dawkins

349. “Our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude of size and speed which our bodies operate at. We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms.”

— Richard Dawkins

350. “The placebo effect is well documented and not even very mysterious. Dummy pills, with no pharmacological activity at all, demonstrably improve health. That is why double-blind drug trials must use placebos as controls. It’s why homoeopathic remedies appear to work, even though they are so dilute that they have the same amount of active ingredient as the placebo control – zero molecules.”

— Richard Dawkins