Top 500 Richard Dawkins Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

406. “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

407. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

409. “If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.”

— Richard Dawkins

410. “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

411. “All the Founding Fathers, whatever their private religious beliefs, would have been aghast to read the journalist Robert Sherman’s report of George Bush Senior’s answer when Sherman asked him whether he recognized the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists: ‘No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.”

— Richard Dawkins

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

416. “I would like to find a way in which people in Saudi Arabia could learn that they can be something other than a Muslim. Some people may not realize this. Of course, there is the problem that you can get in trouble or get stoned.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

418. “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

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419. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

427. “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

428. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

438. “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

439. “The history-deniers themselves are among those I am trying to reach in this book. But, perhaps more importantly, I aspire to arm those are not history-deniers but know some – perhaps members of their own family or church – and find themselves inadequately prepared to argue the case.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

443. “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

444. “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

445. “We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don’t have to bother saying so.”

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

447. “Los genes operan de manera misteriosa.”

— Richard Dawkins

448. “Voltaire got it right long ago: ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

— Richard Dawkins

449. “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

450. “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