Richard Dawkins: Trending quotes

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Richard Dawkins: 644 quotes33 likes

“The four Gospels that made it into the official canon were chosen, more or less arbitrarily, out of a larger sample of at least a dozen … The gospels that didn't make it were omitted by those ecclesiastics perhaps because they included stories that were even more embarrassingly implausible than those in the four canonical ones.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 121

“I don't withdraw a word of my initial statement. But I do now think it may have been incomplete. There is perhaps a fifth category, which may belong under "insane" but which can be more sympathetically characterized by a word like tormented, bullied, or brainwashed. Sincere people who are not ignorant, not stupid, and not wicked can be cruelly torn, almost in two, between the massive evidence of science on the one hand, and their understanding of what their holy book tells them on the other. I think this is one of the truly bad things religion can do to a human mind. There is wickedness here, but it is the wickedness of the institution and what it does to a believing victim, not wickedness on the part of the victim himself. ”

Richard Dawkins

Regarding his 1989 statement "It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." (see above)

“Scientific and technological progress themselves are value-neutral. They are just very good at doing what they do. If you want to do selfish, greedy, intolerant and violent things, scientific technology will provide you with by far the most efficient way of doing so. But if you want to do good, to solve the world's problems, to progress in the best value-laden sense, once again, there is no better means to those ends than the scientific way.”

Richard Dawkins

The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)

“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 book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 138

“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

An Interview by Sheena McDonald (1995)

“Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Yet it is quite probable that she bares not a single one of the old king's genes.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 11. Memes: the new replicators

“Oh, but of course the story of Adam and Eve was only ever symbolic, wasn't it? Symbolic?! So Jesus had himself tortured and executed for a symbolic sin by a non-existent individual? Nobody not brought up in the faith could reach any verdict other than "barking mad."”

Richard Dawkins

Part 2, 00:30:25
Part 2: "The Virus Of Faith", quoted at ibid.
The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

“I am extremely pleased by Daniel Fincke's article, which says exactly what I SHOULD have said and, to my regret, didn't make sufficiently clear in my Reason Rally speech. The best way to summarise it would be to modify the quotation from Johann Hari. Johann said, "I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous beliefs". From now on, my version will be, "I respect you too much to accept that you really believe anything so ridiculous as you claim. Please either defend those beliefs and explain why they are not ridiculous, or else declare that you do not hold them and publicly disown the church to which you claim loyalty."”

Richard Dawkins

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“What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, whereas chance and design both fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 153

“It is an article of passionate faith among "politically correct" biologists and anthropologists that brain size has no connection with intelligence; that intelligence has nothing to do with genes; and that genes are probably nasty fascist things anyway.”

Richard Dawkins

The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)

“If there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports? … Is He manoeuvring to maximise David Attenborough's television ratings?”

Richard Dawkins

River out of Eden (1995)

“So whereabouts in my body might there be a black hole?”

Richard Dawkins

The Enemies of Reason (August 2007)

“science is the best way to do anything (if you want to do terrible things with technology, a terrible weapons for example science is the best way to do it because science is the best way to do anything)”

Richard Dawkins

“The river of my title is a river of DNA, and it flows through time, not space. It is a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues.”

Richard Dawkins

River out of Eden (1995)

“What's to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn't right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question.”

Richard Dawkins

"Richard Dawkins, the Atheist Evangelist", by Larry Taunton, byFaith (18 December 2007) http://byfaithonline.com/page/in-the-world/richard-dawkins-the-atheist-evangelist

“Every person I met believes if there is any disagreement between the Koran and science, then the Koran wins. It's just utterly deplorable. These are now British children who are having their minds stuffed with alien rubbish. Occasionally, my colleagues lecturing in universities lament having undergraduate students walk out of their classes when they talk about evolution. This is almost entirely Muslims.”

Richard Dawkins

"Dawkins attacks 'alien rubbish' taught in Muslim faith schools", Daily Mail (8 October 2011) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2046715/Richard-Dawkins-attacks-alien-rubbish-taught-Muslim-faith-schools.html

“You know you've won the argument when the only counter argument they can find is that you are white or male or old.”

Richard Dawkins

https://twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/626999005747220480 (30 July 2015) <br class="br">Twitter

“Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.”

Richard Dawkins

River out of Eden (1995)

“We’re too stupid to decide on EU (that includes me)”

Richard Dawkins