Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2023 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

403. “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

404. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

407. “Anyone can popularize science if he oversimplifies.”

— Richard Dawkins

408. “A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

410. “It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have.”

— Richard Dawkins

411. “I get the feeling more and more that religion is being left behind.”

— Richard Dawkins

412. “The idea of tiny changes cumulated over many steps is an immensely powerful idea, capable of explaining an enormous range of things that would be otherwise inexplicable.”

— Richard Dawkins

413. “No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth.”

— Richard Dawkins

414. “If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers.”

— Richard Dawkins

415. “In a way, I think religion is to be admired for asking the right questions. I just think it’s got the wrong answers.”

— Richard Dawkins

416. “To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham.”

— Richard Dawkins

417. “Though the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth consuming, hostility provoking rituals, the anti-factual, counter-productive fantasies of religion.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

419. “I might respect you as a brilliant intellect, runner, musician or juggler. But respect your BELIEFS? Only if they’re supported by evidence.”

— Richard Dawkins

420. “I think the world’s always a better place if people are filled with understanding.”

— Richard Dawkins

421. “More poignant for us, at Laetoli in Tanzania are the companionable footprints of three real hominids, probably Australopithecus afarensis, walking together 3.6 million years ago in what was then fresh volcanic ash. Who does not wonder what these individuals were to each other, whether they held hands or even talked, and what forgotten errand they shared in a Pliocene dawn?”

— Richard Dawkins

422. “I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That’s very true.”

— Richard Dawkins

423. “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

424. “Los genes operan de manera misteriosa.”

— Richard Dawkins

425. “Next to the true beauty and magic of the real world, supernatural spells and stage tricks seem cheap and tawdry by comparison. The magic of reality is neither supernatural nor a trick, but – quite simply – wonderful. Wonderful, and real. Wonderful because real.”

— Richard Dawkins

426. “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

427. “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

428. “I don’t think God is an explanation at all. It’s simply redescribing the problem.”

— Richard Dawkins

429. “Commonsense lets us down, because commonsense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large; the mundane world of the familiar.”

— Richard Dawkins

430. “One way to express the answer is that it might happen by ‘chance’. But ‘chance’ is just a word expressing ignorance. It means ‘determined by some as yet unknown, or unspecified, means’.”

— Richard Dawkins

431. “Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives.”

— Richard Dawkins

432. “Many religious people find it hard to imagine how, without religion, one can be good, or would even want to be good.”

— Richard Dawkins

433. “There is no universally agreed definition of a gene.”

— Richard Dawkins

434. “Why, I can’t help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking after himself.”

— Richard Dawkins

435. “If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there’s something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.”

— Richard Dawkins

436. “If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have to look.”

— Richard Dawkins

437. “All qualified physicists, biologists, cosmologists and geologists agree, on the basis of massive, mutually corroborating evidence, that the earth’s age is at least four billion years.”

— Richard Dawkins

438. “What impresses me about Catholic mythology is partly its tasteless kitsch but mostly the airy nonchalance with which these people make up the details as they go along. It is just shamelessly invented.”

— Richard Dawkins

439. “The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation.”

— Richard Dawkins

440. “One gene may be regarded as a unit that survives through a large number of successive individual bodies.”

— Richard Dawkins

441. “You can never be absolutely certain that anything doesn’t exist. But you can show that it’s unlikely.”

— Richard Dawkins

442. “Compassionate doctors sometimes lie to patients about the severity of their condition, and it is not always wrong to do so.”

— Richard Dawkins

443. “Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution?”

— Richard Dawkins

444. “It’s about time we start criticizing faith.”

— Richard Dawkins

445. “Religion’s power to console doesn’t make it true. Even if we make a huge concession; even if it were conclusively demonstrated that belief in God’s existence is completely essential to human psychological and emotional well-being; even if all atheists were despairing neurotics driven to suicide by relentless cosmic angst – none of this would contribute the tiniest jot or tittle of evidence that religious belief is true. It.”

— Richard Dawkins

446. “We’ve all been brought up with the view that religion has some kind of special privileged status. You’re not allowed to criticise it.”

— Richard Dawkins

447. “The book is true, and if evidence seems to condtradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out not the book.”

— Richard Dawkins

448. “The deceitful misquoting of scientists to suit an anti-scientific agenda ranks among the many unchristian habits of fundamentalist authors.”

— Richard Dawkins

449. “The Darwinian theory is in principle capable of explaining life. No other theory that has ever been suggested is in principle capable of explaining life.”

— Richard Dawkins

450. “I can remember at the age of about six being fascinated by the planets and learning all about Mars and Venus and things.”

— Richard Dawkins