Richard Dawkins Quotes: 322 Quotes on Natural Selection, Faith, Atheism, and the Essence of Life

“How do we account for the current paranormal vogue in the popular media? Perhaps it has something to do with the millennium – in which case it's depressing to realise that the millennium is still three years away.”

Richard Dawkins

The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1996)

“evidence is the only good reason to believe anything”

Richard Dawkins

interview shown in AlJazeera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0jA6VsivBE&t=0h26m04s, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0jA6VsivBE&t=0h28m37s

“There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.”

Richard Dawkins

Darwin's Dangerous Disciple: An Interview by Frank Miele (1995)

Imagination

“Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep"chick", and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard”

Richard Dawkins

Blog comment, , to PZ Myers, " Always Name Names https://web.archive.org/web/20110706204901/http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/07/always_name_names.php" (), Pharyngula, quoted in Rebecca Watson, " The Privilege Delusion http://skepchick.org/2011/07/the-privilege-delusion/", Skepchick.
Regarding the Rebecca Watson elevator incident.

Death , Cars , Coffee , Thinking

“Who (apart from the pig) is damaged by bacon?”

Richard Dawkins

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/480273220659339264 (21 June 2014)
Twitter

“But there are many unsophisticated Christians out there … who take the Bible very seriously indeed as a literal and accurate record of history and hence as evidence supporting the religious beliefs. Do these people never open the book that they believe is the literal truth? Why don't they notice the glaring contradictions?”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 120

People , Truth , Books , History

“Mitochondrial DNA is blessedly celibate. (p.53)”

Richard Dawkins

River out of Eden (1995)

“Even sticking to the higher plane of love, is it so very obvious that you can't love more than one person? We seem to manage it with parental love (parents are reproached if they don't at least pretend to love all their children equally), love of books, of food, of wine (love of Chateau Margaux does not preclude love of a fine Hock, and we don't feel unfaithful to the red when we dally with the white), love of composers, poets, holiday beaches, friends... why is erotic love the one exception that everybody instantly acknowledges without even thinking about it?”

Richard Dawkins

Banishing the Green-Eyed Monster http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/richard_dawkins/2007/11/banishing_the_greeneyed_monste.html, November 2007.

Love , Children , Books , Unfaithfulness

“The successful scientist and the raving crank are separated by the quality of their inspirations. But I suspect that this amounts, in practice, to a difference, not so much in ability to notice analogies as in ability to reject foolish analogies and pursue helpful ones.”

Richard Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 8 “Explosions and Spirals” (pp. 195–196)

Success , Help

“We should be offended when children are denied a proper education. We should be offended when children are told they will spend eternity in hell. We should be offended when medical science, for example stem-cell research, is compromised by the bigoted opinions of powerful and above all well-financed ignoramuses. We should be offended when voodoo, of all kinds, is given equal weight to science. We should be offended by hymen reconstruction surgery. We should be offended by 'female circumcision', euphemism for genital mutilation. We should be offended by stoning.”

Richard Dawkins

Lecture at UC Berkeley about The God Delusion, 08/03/2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaJelU29jeI&t=49s
Lecture at UC Berkeley (2008)

Children , Education , Hell , Science

“I want to say that killing for God is not only hideous murder — it is also utterly ridiculous. (Part 1, 00:44:39)”

Richard Dawkins

The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

God , Parting

“It's tempting to say all religions are bad, and I do say all religions are bad, but it's a worse temptation to say all religions are equally bad because they're not. If you look at the actual impact that different religions have on the world it's quite apparent that at present the most evil religion in the world has to be Islam. It's terribly important to modify that because of course that doesn't mean all Muslims are evil, very far from it. Individual Muslims suffer more from Islam than anyone else. They suffer from the homophobia, the misogyny, the joylessness which is preached by extreme Islam, Isis and the Iranian regime. So it is a major evil in the world, we do have to combat it, but we don't do what Trump did and say all Muslims should be shut out of the country. That's draconian, that's illiberal, inhumane and wicked. I am against Islam not least because of the unpleasant effects it has on the lives of Muslims.”

Richard Dawkins

As quoted in "Richard Dawkins: religious education is crucial for British schoolchildren" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/06/11/richard-dawkins-religious-education-crucial-british-schoolchildren/ by Sarah Knapton, The Telegraph (11 June 2017)

World , Religion , Suffering , Evil

“I can think of no moral objection to eating human road kills except for the ones that you mentioned like 'what would the relatives think about it?' and 'would the person themselves have wanted it to happen?', but I do worry a bit about slippery slopes; possibly a little bit more than you do.There are barriers that we have set up in our minds and certainly the barrier between Homo sapiens and any other species is an artificial barrier in the sense that its a kind of 'accident' that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct. Never the less it exists and natural barriers that are there can be useful for preventing slippery slopes and therefore I think I can see an objection to breaching such a barrier because you are then in a weaker position to stop people going further.Another example might be suppose you take the argument in favour of abortion up until the baby was one year old, if a baby was one year old and turned out to have some horrible incurable disease that meant it was going to die in agony in later life, what about infanticide? Strictly morally I can see no objection to that at all, I would be in favour of infanticide but I think i would worry about/I think I would wish at least to give consideration to the person who says 'where does it end?'”

Richard Dawkins

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Peter Singer - The Genius of Darwin: The Uncut Interviews (2009)

Life , People , Disease , Nature

“The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 1. Why Are People?

Books , Animals

“What is the selfish gene? It is not just one single physical bit of DNA. Just as in the primeval soup, it is all replicas of a particular bit of DNA, distributed throughout the world.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 6. Genesmanship

World , Selfishness

“McDonald: Now a lot of people find great comfort from religion. Not everybody is as you are – well-favored, handsome, wealthy, with a good job, happy family life. I mean, your life is good – not everybody's life is good, and religion brings them comfort.Dawkins: There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting – it might be more comforting, for all I know. But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.”

Richard Dawkins

An Interview by Sheena McDonald (1995)

Life , People , Family , Religion

“Yet scientists are required to back up their claims not with private feelings but with publicly checkable evidence. Their experiments must have rigorous controls to eliminate spurious effects. And statistical analysis eliminates the suspicion (or at least measures the likelihood) that the apparent effect might have happened by chance alone.Paranormal phenomena have a habit of going away whenever they are tested under rigorous conditions. This is why the £740,000 reward of James Randi, offered to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal effect under proper scientific controls, is safe. Why don't the television editors insist on some equivalently rigorous test? Could it be that they believe the alleged paranormal powers would evaporate and bang go the ratings?Consider this. If a paranormalist could really give an unequivocal demonstration of telepathy (precognition, psychokinesis, reincarnation, whatever it is), he would be the discoverer of a totally new principle unknown to physical science. The discoverer of the new energy field that links mind to mind in telepathy, or of the new fundamental force that moves objects around a table top, deserves a Nobel prize and would probably get one. If you are in possession of this revolutionary secret of science, why not prove it and be hailed as the new Newton? Of course, we know the answer. You can't do it. You are a fake.Yet the final indictment against the television decision-makers is more profound and more serious. Their recent splurge of paranormalism debauches true science and undermines the efforts of their own excellent science departments. The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudo-scientific charlatans. The public appetite for wonder can be fed, through the powerful medium of television, without compromising the principles of honesty and reason.”

Richard Dawkins

[Human gullibility beyond belief,— the “paranormal” in the media, The Sunday Times, 1996-08-25]

Truth , Secret , Feeling , Decision

“I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don't look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can't find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.”

Richard Dawkins

Giles Whittell, " The world according to Richard Dawkins http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/science/article4191347.ece" (), The Times, quoted in Trevor Grundy, " Richard Dawkins Pedophilia Remarks Provoke Outrage http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/09/richard-dawkins-pedophilia_n_3895514.html" (), The Huffington Post.

People , Way , Childhood , Personality

“I do remember one formative influence in my undergraduate life. There was an elderly professor in my department who had been passionately keen on a particular theory for, oh, a number of years, and one day an American visiting researcher came and he completely and utterly disproved our old man's hypothesis. The old man strode to the front, shook his hand and said, "My dear fellow, I wish to thank you, I have been wrong these fifteen years". And we all clapped our hands raw. That was the scientific ideal, of somebody who had a lot invested, a lifetime almost invested in a theory, and he was rejoicing that he had been shown wrong and that scientific truth had been advanced.”

Richard Dawkins

Part 1, 00:13:32
The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

Life , Truth , Passion , Parting

“I have just discovered that without her father's consent this sweet, trusting, gullible six-year-old is being sent, for weekly instruction, to a Roman Catholic nun. What chance has she?”

Richard Dawkins book Viruses of the Mind

Viruses of the Mind (1993)

Chance

“If it's really true, that the museum at Liberty University has dinosaur fossils which are labelled as being 3000 years old, then that is an educational disgrace. It is debauching the whole idea of a university, and I would strongly encourage any members of Liberty University who may be here… to leave and go to a proper university.”

Richard Dawkins

At Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, Broadcasted by C-SPAN2 http://richarddawkins.net/home

Education , Idea , Universe

“Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 40

Sex , Water

“[If] there is mercy in nature, it is accidental. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

"A Devil's Chaplain"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

Nature , Indifference

“It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.”

Richard Dawkins

" Is Science a Religion? http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/articles/dawkins.html", The Humanist (January 1997)

World , Disease , Faith , Fashion

“Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 4. The Gene machine

Communication

“Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.”

Richard Dawkins

On a hypothetical fetus with Down syndrome https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/statuses/502106262088466432 (20 August 2014)
Twitter

World

“What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital.”

Richard Dawkins

River out of Eden (1995)

“On the Arguement from Scripture: "Ever since the nineteenth century, scholarly theologians have made an overwhelming case that the gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened in the history of the real world. All were written long after the death of Jesus, and also after the epistles of Paul, which mentioned almost none of the alleged facts of Jesus's life. All were then copied and recopied … by falilible scribes who, in any case, had their own religious agendas."”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 118

Life , Death , World , History

“But you cannot have an unnatural welfare state, unless you also have unnatural birth control, otherwise the end result will be misery even greater than that which obtains in nature.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 7. Family planning

Birth , Nature

“The population of the US is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the US leads the world by miles. You would think that a country with such resources, and such a field of talent, would be able to elect a leader of the highest quality. Yet, what has happened? At the end of all the primaries and party caucuses, the speeches and the televised debates, after a year or more of non-stop electioneering bustle, who, out of that entire population of 300 million, emerges at the top of the heap? George Bush.”

Richard Dawkins

"Bin Laden's victory " http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,,919618,00.html The Guardian ()

People , World , Education , Thinking

“I can't be sure God does not exist… On a scale of seven, where one means I know he exists, and seven I know he doesn't, I call myself a six… That doesn't mean I'm absolutely confident, that I absolutely know, because I don't.”

Richard Dawkins

Dawkins on The Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9102740/Richard-Dawkins-I-cant-be-sure-God-does-not-exist.html, .

God , Confidence

“All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.”

Richard Dawkins

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/365473573768400896 (8 August 2013)
Twitter

Age , World

“On the Argument from Degree: "That's an argument? You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion."”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 102

God , People , Perfection

“You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world, you also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.”

Richard Dawkins

The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1996)

World , Understanding , Time

“Your DNA may be destined to mingle with mine. Salutations!”

Richard Dawkins

River out of Eden (1995)

“My last vestige of "hands-off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11, 2001, followed by the "National Day of Prayer", when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonation and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

"Time to Stand Up"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

People , Faith , Religion , Problem

“The reason Smolin's idea is interesting is that it may answer the challenge, "The universe is too good to be true. It looks like a put-up job." But, note that the Smolin hypothesis cannot be used to account in particular for the BIOLOGICAL part of that "too good to be true". Smolinian selection may account for the fact that our universe has the necessary constants, dimensionality and laws to last for last for a long time (not fizzle out or crunch immediately its initiating bang), long enough to spawn daughter universes (and INCIDENTALLY long enough to breed life). But Smolinian selection cannot account for the fact that our universe is specifically congenial to life, or to intelligent life, or to us. My negative conclusion would break down only if life itself is in the habit of engineering the spawning of daughter universes. As far as I am aware, this hasn't been suggested, but it is, I suppose, a theoretical possibility that daughter universes are generated as a consequence of the fooling around of highly evolved physicists.”

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins, "Science Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder" https://www.edge.org/conversation/science-delusion-and-the-appetite-for-wonder, John Brockman, Edge.org, 1.2.97.

Life , Law , Fools , Intelligence

“It is often said, mainly by the 'no-contests', that although there is no positive evidence for the existence of God, nor is there evidence against his existence. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?”

Richard Dawkins

From speech at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, . Frequently misattributed to The God Delusion.
quoted in [EDITORIAL: A scientist's case against God, The Independent (London), April 20, 1992, 17] and [2011-05-27, What Should I Believe?: Philosophical Essays for Critical Thinking, Paul Gomberg, Broadview Press, 9781554810130, 146, http://books.google.com/books?id=76WxxHN9I0kC&pg=PA146&dq=%22Faith+is+the+great+cop-out%22]

God , Sense , Christmas

“In the case of the cosmos, […] even if we don’t understand how it came about, it’s not helpful to postulate a creator, because the creator is the very kind of thing that needs an explanation - and although it's difficult enough to explain how a very simple origin of the universe came into being - how matter and energy, how one or two physical constants came into existence - although it’s difficult enough to think how simplicity came into existence, it’s a hell of a lot harder to think how something as complicated as a God comes into existence - difficult enough to think of how a deist God comes into existence, and even more difficult to think of - how a Christian God, who actually cares about things like sin and gets Himself born of a virgin.”

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins vs. John Lennox, 21/10/2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0UIbd0eLxw&t=10m38s
"Has Science Buried God?" Debate (2008)

God , Hell , Understanding , Thinking

“I'm not clever enough to be a physicist.”

Richard Dawkins

When asked about why he chose to become a biologist. UR Samtiden - Verklighetens magi http://urplay.se/172258 2012-10-27.