Richard Dawkins Quotes & Sayings

Religion is nothing more than a useless and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident. Religious behavior may be a misfiring, an unfortunate byproduct of an underlying psychological propensity which in other circumstances is, or once was, useful. — Richard Dawkins

Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it. — Richard Dawkins

Those people who leap from personal bafflement at a natural phenomenon straight to a hasty invocation of the supernatural are no better than the fools who see a conjuror bending a spoon and leap to the conclusion that it is 'paranormal'. — Richard Dawkins

If you think about it, 534 members of the U.S. Congress cannot all be religious. That's just statistical nonsense. Many of them are quite well-educated. — Richard Dawkins

I don't actually think 'The Selfish Gene' is a very good title. I think that's one of my worst titles. — Richard Dawkins

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an expla nation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc magic. — Richard Dawkins

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

These facts about today's political climate in the United States, and what they imply, would have horrified Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Adams and all their friends. Whether they were atheists, agnostics, deists or Christians, they would have recoiled in horror from the theocrats of early 21st-century Washington. — Richard Dawkins

For all I know, entire scientific reputations may have been built on the work of students and colleagues! I don't know what can be done to combat this dishonesty. — Richard Dawkins

There is something cheap about magic that works just because it is magic. — Richard Dawkins

Writing a computer virus program is child's play. Any fool can do it, which is why the silly little twerps who do have nothing to be proud of. — Richard Dawkins

It is immoral to brand children with religion. 'This is a Catholic child.' 'That is a Muslim child.' I want everyone to flinch when they hear such a phrase, just as they would if they heard, 'That is a Marxist child.' — Richard Dawkins

However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or
complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't
this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who will
never even be offered life in the first place? — Richard Dawkins

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time. — Richard Dawkins

What is illiberal is not persuasion but imposition of one's views. — Richard Dawkins

You can never be absolutely certain that anything doesn't exist. But you can show that it's unlikely. — Richard Dawkins

I think we certainly benefit from social institutions which encourage us towards moral behavior. It's very important to have law. It's very important to have a moral education. — Richard Dawkins

Every night of our lives, we dream, and our brain concocts visions which are, at least until we wake up, highly convincing. Most of us have had experiences which are verging on hallucination. It shows the power of the brain to knock up illusions. — Richard Dawkins

It is raining DNA outside. — Richard Dawkins

And of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history, the medieval equivalent of the Nigerian Internet scam but far more successful. — Richard Dawkins

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

Some physicists solve that problem of the necessity of finely tuned physical constants ... by invoking the anthropic principle, saying, well, here we are, we exist, we have to be in the kind of universe capable of giving rise to us. That in itself is, I think, unsatisfying, and as John Lennox rightly says, some physicists solve that by the multiverse idea-the idea that our universe is just one of many universes. — Richard Dawkins

Society bends over backward to be accommodating to religious sensibilities but not to other kinds of sensibilities. If I say something offensive to religious people, I'll be universally censured, including by many atheists. — Richard Dawkins

Perhaps Islam is analogous to a carnivorous gene complex, Buddhism to a herbivorous one. — Richard Dawkins

A good scientific theory is one which is falsifiable, which has not been falsified. — Richard Dawkins

Mysteries do not lose their poetry when solved. Quite the contrary; the solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle and, in any case, when you have solved one mystery you uncover others, perhaps to inspire greater poetry — Richard Dawkins

You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being ... Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues. — Richard Dawkins

Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence. — Richard Dawkins

It is quite true that many scientists, many physicists, maintain that the physical constants, the half dozen or so numbers that physicists have to simply assume in order to derive the rest of their understanding ... have to be assumed. You can't provide a rationale for why those numbers are there. Physicists have calculated that if any of these numbers was a little bit different, the universe as we know it wouldn't exist. — Richard Dawkins

I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will. — Richard Dawkins

Does religion fill a much needed gap? It is often said that there is a God-shaped gap in the brain which needs to be filled: we have a psychological need for God
imaginary friend, father, big brother, confessor, confidant
and the need has to be satisfied whether God really exists or not. But could it be that God clutters up a gap that we'd be better off filling with something else? Science, perhaps? Art? Human friendship? Humanism? Love of this life in the real world, giving no credence to other lives beyond the grave? — Richard Dawkins

Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction). — Richard Dawkins

To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham. — Richard Dawkins

Let us understand Darwinism so we can walk in the opposite direction when it comes to setting up society. — Richard Dawkins

We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. — Richard Dawkins

You can legally lie about the real world to your heart's content, but until some human being is materially damaged, nobody will complain. — Richard Dawkins

A herp is simply the kind of animal studied by a herpetologist, and that is a pretty lame way to define an animal. The only other name that comes close is the biblical 'creeping thing — Richard Dawkins

Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'. — Richard Dawkins

There's clearly a lot of Ludditism, and you see it in all the hysteria about every scientific story. — Richard Dawkins

Religion and science have nothing to do with each other, they're about different things, science is about the way the world works and religion is about miracles, I mean, if you ask most ordinary people in church or in a mosque why they believe, it's almost certainly got something to do with the belief that God does wonderful things, that God intervenes, that God heals the sick, that God answers prayers, God forgives sins. — Richard Dawkins

A good theory explains a lot but postulates little. — Richard Dawkins

It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine. — Richard Dawkins

Do you really mean the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward? That's not morality, that's just sucking up. — Richard Dawkins

I don't do formal debates, because formal debates where you have two people up on a stage in equal status, and each of them is given 20 minutes to give their point of view, and then 10 minutes for a rebuttal, or whatever, that creates the illusion that you really do have here two equal points of view of equal scientific standing. — Richard Dawkins

Either Jesus had a father, or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it. — Richard Dawkins

At least the fundamentalists haven't tried to dilute their message. Their faith is exposed for what it is for all to see. — Richard Dawkins

on page 96 of my hero Peter Medawar's book The Limits of Science: 'I regret my disbelief in God and religious answers generally, for I believe it would give satisfaction and comfort to many in need of it if it were possible to discover good scientific and philosophic reasons to believe in God. — Richard Dawkins

Compassionate doctors sometimes lie to patients about the severity of their condition, and it is not always wrong to do so. — Richard Dawkins

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

If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself tortured and executed in payment - thereby, incidentally, condemning remote future generations of Jews to pogroms and persecution as 'Christ-killers': did that hereditary sin pass down in the semen too? — Richard Dawkins

It's an important point to realize that the genetic programming of our lives is not fully deterministic. It is statistical - it is in any animal merely statistical - not deterministic. — Richard Dawkins

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived. — Richard Dawkins

The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist. — Richard Dawkins

Matter flows from place to place, and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing; I find the reality thrilling. — Richard Dawkins

One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all. — Richard Dawkins

It is all too easy to mistake passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will. — Richard Dawkins

Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops. — Richard Dawkins

Evolution, or its driving engine natural selection, has no foresight. In every generation within every species, the individuals best equipped to survive and reproduce contribute more than their fair share of genes to the next generation. The consequence, blind as it is, is the nearest approach to foresight that nature permits. [...] It is always tinkering: here shrinking a bit, there expanding a bit, constantly adjusting, putting on and taking off, optimising immediate reproductive success. Survival in future centuries doesn't enter into the calculation, for the good reason that it isn't really a calculation at all. It all happens automatically, as some genes survive in the gene pool and others don't. — Richard Dawkins

Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at that. — Richard Dawkins

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

You can't statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you're still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing. — Richard Dawkins

It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself. — Richard Dawkins

Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men - above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends. - ALBERT EINSTEIN — Richard Dawkins

There is something distinctly odd about the argument, however. Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don't. Pascal's Wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he'd see through the deception. — Richard Dawkins

If you're an atheist, you know, you believe, this is the only life you're going to get. It's a precious life. It's a beautiful life. Its something we should live to the full, to the end of our days. Where if you're religious and you believe in another life somehow, that means you don't live this life to the full because you think you're going to get another one. That's an awfully negative way to live a life. Being a atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily and fully — Richard Dawkins

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

People sometimes try to score debating points by saying, Evolution is only a theory. That is correct, but it's important to understand what that means. It is also only a theory that the world goes round the Sun - it's just a theory for which there is an immense amount of evidence. There are many scientific theories that are in doubt. Even within evolution, there is some room for controversy. But that we are cousins of apes and jackals and starfish, let's say, that is a fact in the ordinary sense of the word. — Richard Dawkins

As Einstein said, 'If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. ' Michael Shermer, In The Science of Good and Evil, calls it a debate stopper. If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder', you reveal yourself as an immoral person, 'and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you'. If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good. — Richard Dawkins

Areas where there is a lack of data, or a lack of understanding, are automatically assumed to belong, by default, to God. — Richard Dawkins

Science tells us what we have reason to believe. Not what we have a duty to believe. Not what experts, in their pontificating wisdom, instruct us to believe ... No, science tells us what there is good reason to believe. — Richard Dawkins

I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things. — Richard Dawkins

We have this one life, let's enjoy it, let's live it to the full and don't get so worked up about don't identify yourself so passionately with this business called religion. — Richard Dawkins

It is time to stop the mealy-mouthed euphemisms: 'Nationalists', 'Loyalists', 'Communities', 'Ethnic Groups', 'Cultures', 'Civilizations'. Religions is the word you need. Religions is the word you are struggling hypocritially to avoid. — Richard Dawkins

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

But perhaps life has a tendency to converge on a pathway, something like a magnetic pull that draws it back despite temporary deviations. — Richard Dawkins

Not to grow up properly is to retain our 'caterpillar' quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our caterpillar nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists and quacks. The genius of the human child, mental caterpillar extraordinary, is for soaking up information and ideas, not for criticizing them. If critical faculties later grow it will be in spite of, not because of, the inclinations of childhood. The blotting paper of the child's brain is the unpromising seedbed, the base upon which later the sceptical attitude, like a struggling mustard plant, may possibly grow. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive scepticism of adult science. — Richard Dawkins

A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a jet plane's exhaust. A great improvement on a simple ballistic shell, it still cannot discriminate particular targets. It could not zero in on a designated New York skyscraper if launched from as far away as Boston. — Richard Dawkins

It has not escaped the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can't change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent. — Richard Dawkins

Something pretty mysterious had to give rise to the origin of the universe. — Richard Dawkins

The adult world may seem a cold and empty place, with no fairies and no Father Christmas, no Toyland or Narnia, no Happy Hunting Ground where mourned pets go, and no angels - guardian or garden variety. But there are also no devils, no hellfire, no wicked witches, no ghosts, no haunted houses, no daemonic possession, no bogeymen or ogres. Yes, Teddy and Dolly turn out not to be really alive. But there are warm, live, speaking, thinking, adult bedf ellows to hold, and many of us find it a more rewarding kind of love than the childish affection for stuffed toys, however soft and cuddly they may be. — Richard Dawkins

I have devoted a whole book (Unweaving the Rainbow) to ultimate meaning, to the poetry of science, and to rebutting, specifically and at length, the charge of nihilistic negativity, so I shall restrain myself here. — Richard Dawkins

Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But it cannot have been the sort of God that we need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early. — Richard Dawkins

I should have been put down at birth. — Richard Dawkins

Of course you can use the products of science to do bad things, but you can use them to do good things, too. — Richard Dawkins

It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very, very high level of technology- and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. And I suppose it's possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer. — Richard Dawkins

Science is interesting, and if you don't agree you can fuck off.
Note: Dawkins was quoting a former editor of New Scientist Magazine, who is as yet unidentified (possibly Jeremy Webb) — Richard Dawkins

Philosophy and the subjects known as 'humanities' are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived. — Richard Dawkins

Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next. — Richard Dawkins

A consequentialist or utilitarian is likely to approach the abortion question in a very different way, by trying to weigh up suffering. Does the embryo suffer? (Presumably not if it is aborted before it has a nervous system; and even if it is old enough to have a nervous system it surely suffers less than, say, an adult cow in a slaughterhouse.) Does the pregnant woman, or her family, suffer if she does not have an abortion? Very possibly so; and, in any case, given that the embryo lacks a nervous system, shouldn't the mother's well-developed nervous system have the choice? — Richard Dawkins

Let our tribute to the dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe. — Richard Dawkins

Not only is science corrosive to religion, but religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp. — Richard Dawkins

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. — Richard Dawkins

I need to learn not to bend over backwards to be nice to faith-heads. Give these people an inch and they take a league. I think, as I did when I wrote The God Delusion, that the Roman Catholic Church is a disgusting institution, the second most evil religion in the world. — Richard Dawkins

There is no refutation of Darwinian evolution in existence. If a refutation ever were to come about, it would come from a scientist, and not an idiot. — Richard Dawkins

The oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor of the other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe. During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world. Several centuries later, Muhammad and his followers reverted to the uncompromising monotheism of the Jewish original, but not its exclusiveness, and founded Islam upon a new holy book, the Koran or Qur'an, adding a powerful ideology of military conquest to spread the faith. — Richard Dawkins

As I have put it before, if the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we would none of us be here. We all can regard ourselves as exquisitely improbable. But here, in a triumph of hindsight, we are. — Richard Dawkins

A universe with a creator would be a totally different kind of universe, scientifically speaking, than one without. — Richard Dawkins

No educated person believes the Adam and Eve myth nowadays, but it's surprising how many parents think that it's somehow fun to pass on this falsehood to their children ... I would want to argue that the truth of evolution is more interesting and more poetic — Richard Dawkins

It does not seem ever to have been satisfactorily answered why the two first operational atomic bombs were used - against the strongly voiced wishes of the leading physicists responsible for developing them - to destroy two cities instead of being deployed in the equivalent of spectacularly shooting out candles. — Richard Dawkins

Science is the poetry of reality. — Richard Dawkins