Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “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

352. “The obvious objections to the execution of Saddam Hussein are valid and well aired. His death will provoke violent strife between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and between Iraqis in general and the American occupation forces.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

354. “Evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion.”

— Richard Dawkins

355. “People like to trace their ancestry.”

— Richard Dawkins

356. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

360. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

362. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

365. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

375. “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

376. “Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

378. “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

379. “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

380. “I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody is too polite – or too devout – to notice: religion, and specifically the devaluing effect that religion has on human life.”

— Richard Dawkins

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

387. “I think I would abolish schools which systematically inculcate sectarian beliefs.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

389. “Religions do make claims about the universe – the same kinds of claims that scientists make, except they’re usually false.”

— Richard Dawkins

390. “Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don’t know it.”

— Richard Dawkins

391. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

393. “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

394. “I’m quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.”

— Richard Dawkins

395. “We should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics.”

— Richard Dawkins

396. “Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.”

— Richard Dawkins

397. “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

398. “Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It’s a sort of crime against childhood.”

— Richard Dawkins

399. “By dislaiming the idea of a next life, we can take more excitement in this one!”

— Richard Dawkins

400. “We are a very, very unusual species.”

— Richard Dawkins