Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion.”

— Richard Dawkins

352. “I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.”

— Richard Dawkins

353. “Are science and religion converging? No. There are modern scientists whose words sound religious but whose beliefs, on close examination, turn out to be identical to those of other scientists who straightforwardly call themselves atheists.”

— Richard Dawkins

354. “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

355. “If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: ‘Have they discovered evolution yet?”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “I don’t care about what is good and what is evil, I care about what is true.”

— Richard Dawkins

364. “Human psychology has a near universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire.”

— Richard Dawkins

365. “I don’t want to sound callous. I mean, even if I have nothing to offer, that doesn’t matter, because that still doesn’t mean that what anybody else has to offer therefore has to be true.”

— Richard Dawkins

366. “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

367. “An ESS is stable, not because it is particularly good for the individuals participating in it, but simply because it is immune to treachery from within.”

— Richard Dawkins

368. “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

369. “Science ha seradicated smallpox, can immunise against most previously deadly viruses, can kill most previously deadly bacteria. Theology has done nothing but talk of pestilence as the wages of sin.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

371. “There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness, which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence.”

— Richard Dawkins

372. “People like to trace their ancestry.”

— Richard Dawkins

373. “I was confirmed at my prep school at the age of 13.”

— Richard Dawkins

374. “To describe religions as mind viruses is sometimes interpreted as contemptuous or even hostile. It is both. I am often asked why I am so hostile to organized religion.”

— Richard Dawkins

375. “Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. Simulation is both safer and faster. The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have cumulated in subjective consciousness.”

— Richard Dawkins

376. “Religions are not imaginative, not poetic, not soulful. On the contrary, they are parochial, small-minded, niggardly with the human imagination, precisely where science is generous.”

— Richard Dawkins

377. “Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.”

— Richard Dawkins

378. “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

379. “I’ve been reading an Alabama newspaper that one man shot another man because he beat him in a Bible-quoting competition.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

381. “Science coverage could be improved by the recognition that science is timeless, and therefore science stories should not need to be pegged to an item in the news.”

— Richard Dawkins

382. “The river of my title is a river of DNA, a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues.”

— Richard Dawkins

383. “I don’t know what to think about magic and fairy tales.”

— Richard Dawkins

384. “It is all too easy to mistake passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will.”

— Richard Dawkins

385. “The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no mystery about this. It had to happen by definition.”

— Richard Dawkins

386. “Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.”

— Richard Dawkins

387. “I’m not much given to straight, irony-free hero-worship.”

— Richard Dawkins

388. “I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.”

— Richard Dawkins

389. “But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.”

— Richard Dawkins

390. “If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible.”

— Richard Dawkins

391. “But if science cannot answer some ultimate question, what makes anybody think that religion can?”

— Richard Dawkins

392. “There is great variation in brain power all the way from Einstien on one hand to Sarah Palin on the other.”

— Richard Dawkins

393. “What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading.”

— Richard Dawkins

394. “To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and ‘improved’ by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries.”

— Richard Dawkins

395. “The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness.”

— Richard Dawkins

396. “There is in every village a torch – the teacher: and an extinguisher – the clergyman. – VICTOR HUGO.”

— Richard Dawkins

397. “Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil.”

— Richard Dawkins

398. “I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content.”

— Richard Dawkins

399. “Given a hundred clones of Carl Sagan, we might have some hope for the next century.”

— Richard Dawkins

400. “There is something so mysterious that it is almost like God. God is in the equations. God is in the fundamental constants. And that’s fine. I mean, that’s just redefinition of that which we find mysterious at the basis of the universe.”

— Richard Dawkins