Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination.”

— Richard Dawkins

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

359. “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

360. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “Evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion.”

— Richard Dawkins

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747.”

— Richard Dawkins

385. “And the beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

393. “No sane creator, setting out from scratch to design a flat-fish, would have conceived on his drawing board the absurd distortion of the head needed to bring both eyes round to one side.”

— Richard Dawkins

394. “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

395. “People like to trace their ancestry.”

— Richard Dawkins

396. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

400. “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