Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

328. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

335. “I love romantic poetry.”

— Richard Dawkins

336. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

338. “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

339. “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

340. “It is raining DNA outside.”

— Richard Dawkins

341. “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

342. “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

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

347. “Thus the creationist’s favourite question “What is the use of half an eye?” Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye.”

— Richard Dawkins

348. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

350. “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