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

Uncover Richard Dawkins' profound quotes on natural selection, faith, alternative medicine, atheism, and the essence of life. Engage with his extraordinary ideas about our world.

Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist and author. He is known for popularizing the gene-centered view of evolution through his book The Selfish Gene and coining the term "meme." Dawkins has also been a vocal critic of creationism, intelligent design, and religion, expressing his atheistic views in books like The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion. He founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science in 2006 and has received numerous academic and writing awards. Dawkins was born on March 26, 1941 in Nairobi, Kenya to parents who were interested in natural sciences. He grew up with a belief in Christianity but eventually became an atheist after realizing that Darwinism provided a better explanation for the complexity of life.

Dawkins studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford under Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1966 and continued his research as a research assistant until 1967. Dawkins then served as an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California before returning to Oxford as a lecturer in 1970. He held various academic positions at Oxford, including Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science from 1995 to 2008. Dawkins has delivered numerous lectures and has edited several journals. He is affiliated with New College, Oxford as an emeritus fellow and joined the professoriate of the New College of the Humanities in 2011.

✵ 26. March 1941
Richard Dawkins photo
Richard Dawkins: 322   quotes 32   likes

Richard Dawkins Quotes

“Imagine you are God. You’re all-powerful, nothing is beyond you. You’re all-loving. So it is really, really important to you that humans are left in no doubt about your existence and your loving nature, and exactly what they need to do in order to get to heaven and avoid eternity in the fires of hell. It’s really important to you to get that across. So what do you do? Well, if you’re Jehovah, apparently this is what you do. You talk in riddles. You tell stories which on the surface have a different message from the one you apparently want us to understand. You expect us to hear X, and instinctively understand that it needs to be interpreted in the light of Y, which you happen to have said in the course of a completely different story 500-1,000 years earlier. Instead of speaking directly into our heads - which God has presumed the capability of doing so - simply, clearly and straightforwardly in terms which the particular individual being addressed will immediately understand and respond to positively - you steep your messages in symbols, in metaphors. In fact, you choose to convey the most important message in the history of creation in code, as if you aspired to be Umberto Eco or Dan Brown. Anyone would think your top priority was to keep generation after generation after generation of theologians in meaningless employment, rather than communicate an urgent life-or-death message to the creatures you love more than any other.”

Richard Dawkins

FFRF 2012 National Convention, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJTQiChzTNI?t=43m19s

Love , Life , Death , God

“The late Christopher Evans, a psychologist and author, calculated that if the motor car had evolved as fast as the computer, and over the same time period, "Today you would be able to buy a Rolls-Royce for £35, it would do three million miles to the gallon, and it would deliver enough power to drive the QE2 And if you were interested in miniaturisation, you could place half a dozen of them on a pinhead."”

Richard Dawkins

The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)

Cars , Time

“I’m all for offending people’s religion. I think it should be offended at every opportunity”

Richard Dawkins
People , Religion , Thinking

“The Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation… claims… the "Whole substance" of the wine is converted into the blood of Christ,; the appearance of wine that remains is "merely accidental", "inhering in no substance". Transubstantiation is colloquially taught as meaning that the wine "literally" turns into the blood of Christ. Whether in its obfuscatory Aristotelian or its franker colloquial form, the claim of transubstantiation can be made only if we do serious violence to the normal meanings of words like 'substance' and 'literally'.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

"Viruses of the Mind"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

Appearance , Wine , Christ

“To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer.”

Richard Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 6 “Origins and Miracles” (p. 141)

“Eugenics was not inspired by Darwin's natural selection but by ancient agricultural ARTIFICIAL selection. Eugenics is UNnatural selection.”

Richard Dawkins

https://twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/566866395540246528 (15 February 2015)
Twitter

Nature

“If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so. The trick is to want the right things, then science will provide you with the most effective methods of achieving them.”

Richard Dawkins

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

Science , Evil

“Reason has built the modern world. It is a precious but also a fragile thing, which can be corroded by apparently harmless irrationality. We must favor verifiable evidence over private feeling. Otherwise we leave ourselves vulnerable to those who would obscure the truth.”

Richard Dawkins

The Enemies of Reason, "Slaves to Superstition" [1.01], 13 August 2007, timecode 00:46:47ff
The Enemies of Reason (August 2007)

Truth , World , Feeling

“If we ever talk to aliens, their civilisation will be far more advanced than ours (because of distances involved). They won't be religious!”

Richard Dawkins

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/435344902591770624 (17 February 2014)
Twitter

“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

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

Cars

“Thus the creationist's favourite question "What is the use of half an eye?" Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye.”

Richard Dawkins

Part 2: "The Virus of Faith"
The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

Question

“The fact that something is written down is persuasive to people not used to asking questions like: ‘Who wrote it, and when?’ ‘How did they know what to write?’ ‘Did they, in their time really mean what we, in our time, understand them to be saying?’ ‘Were they unbiased observers, or did they have an agenda that coloured their writing?’.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 118 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007

People , Understanding , Question , Time

“The world becomes full of organisms that have what it takes to become ancestors. That, in a sentence, is Darwinism.”

Richard Dawkins

River out of Eden (1995)

World

“This not only misses the point, it is the precise antithesis of the point.”

Richard Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 10 “The One True Tree of Life” (p. 261)

“More generally it is completely unrealistic to claim, as Gould and many others do, that religion keeps itself away from science's turf, restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.”

Richard Dawkins

"When Religion Steps on Science’s Turf", Free Inquiry (1998)

Religion , Universe , Science

“It would be deeply depressing if the only way children could get moral values was from religion. Either from scripture, and God knows we don't want them to get it from scripture, I mean, just look at scripture. Or, from being afraid of God, being intimidated by God. Anybody who is good for only those two reasons is not really being good at all. Why not teach children things like the Golden Rule, do as you would be done by, how would you like it if other children did that to you, so why do you do it to them… I think it's depressing that anybody should suggest that you actually need God in order to be moral. I would hope that our morals come from a better source than that, and therefore they are genuinely moral rather than based on outmoded scripture, or based on fear.”

Richard Dawkins

BBC http://youtube.com/watch?v=HtUd7-tha_w, ()

God , Children , Fear , Religion

“… it seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye … It's no wonder "the" eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom … It is a geological blink.”

Richard Dawkins

River out of Eden (1995)

Time , Animals

“Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

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

Sun

“You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells.”

Richard Dawkins

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

Books

“[…] if I am asked for a single phrase to characterize my role as Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, I think I would claim Advocate for Disinterested Truth.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

"Science, Genetics and Ethics: Memo for Tony Blair"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

Truth , Understanding , Thinking , Science

“For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.”

Richard Dawkins

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

Time

“We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

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

Life , Problem

“Isn't Deepak Chopra just exploiting Quantum jargon as plausible-sounding hocus pocus?”

Richard Dawkins

The Enemies of Reason (August 2007)

“Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 176

Nature , Parent

“Gravity is not a version of the truth. It is the truth. Anybody who doubts it is invited to jump out of a tenth-floor window.”

Richard Dawkins

The Genius of Charles Darwin (2008)

Truth

“Our subjective judgment of what seems like a good bet is irrelevant to what is actually a good bet.”

Richard Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 6 “Origins and Miracles” (p. 162)

“… a lion wants to eat an antelope's body, but the antelope has very different plans for its body. This is not normally regarded as competition for a resource, but logically it is hard to see why not.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 5. Aggression: stability and the selfish machine

“If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them? Who's God trying to impress? Presumably himself, since he is judge and jury, as well as execution victim.”

Richard Dawkins

Part 2, 00:29:56
The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

God , Forgiveness , Parting

“It's almost impossible to say anything against Islam in this country, because you are accused of being racist or Islamophobic.”

Richard Dawkins

2008 comment quoted in "Fury over Richard Dawkins's burka jibe as atheist tells of his 'visceral revulsion' at Muslim dress", Daily Mail (10 August 2010) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1301750/Fury-Richard-Dawkinss-burka-jibe-atheist-tells-revulsion-Muslim-dress.html

Country

“… it is certainly wrong to condemn poor old Homo Sapiens as the only species to kill his own kind, the only inheritor of the mark of Cain, and similar melodramatic charges.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 5. Aggression: stability and the selfish machine

“The popularity of the paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement. I think that the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same appetite which drives the best of true science, and it is an appetite which true science is best qualified to satisfy.”

Richard Dawkins

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

Understanding , Thinking , Science

“… a gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

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

Appearance , Selfishness

“… the true utility function of life, that which is being maximised in the natural world, is DNA survival. But DNA is not floating free; it is locked up in living bodies and it has made the most of the levers of power at its disposal.”

Richard Dawkins

River out of Eden (1995)

Life , World , Nature

“With respect to those meanings of "human" that are relevant to the morality of abortion, any fetus is less human than an adult pig.”

Richard Dawkins

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/311774201012948992 (13 March 2013)
Twitter

“Don't call him "clock boy" since he never made a clock. Hoax Boy, having hoaxed his way into the White House, now wants $15M in addition!”

Richard Dawkins

@RichardDawkins https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/669098728662409216 ()
Regarding the Ahmed Mohamed clock incident.
Twitter

Way , Boy , Housing

“… leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods … express a preference for "natural" methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

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

Nature

“… you need more than luck to navigate successfully through a thousand sieves in succession.”

Richard Dawkins

River out of Eden (1995)

Success

“It is even possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, historical case that Jesus never lived at all … Although Jesus probably existed, reputable biblical scholars do not in general regard the New Testament (and obviously not the Old Testament) as reliable record of what actually happened in history, and I shall not consider the Bible further evidence for any kind of deity.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 122

History , Support

“It may be that brain hardware has co-evolved with the internal virtual worlds that it creates. This can be called hardware-software co-evolution.”

Richard Dawkins

The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)

World

“Three imaginary readers looked over my shoulder while I was writing, and I now dedicate the book to them. […] First the general reader, the layman […] second the expert [and] third the student.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Preface
The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989)

Books

“Those people who think sexual abuse is a black-or-white, all-or-none category are incapable of clear, logical thought.”

Richard Dawkins

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/282854320133775360
Twitter

People , Thinking

“There is no spirit-driven life force, no throbbing, heaving, pullulating, protoplasmic, mystic jelly. Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information.”

Richard Dawkins

River out of Eden (1995)

Life

“The wheel may be one of those cases where the engineering solution can be seen in plain view, yet be unattainable in evolution because it lies [on] the other side of a deep valley, cutting unbridgeably across the massif of Mount Improbable.”

Richard Dawkins

[Dawkins, Richard, Richard Dawkins, Why don't animals have wheels?, Sunday Times, November 24, 1996, http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/1996-11-24wheels.shtml, October 29, 2008, http://web.archive.org/web/20070221073440/http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/1996-11-24wheels.shtml, February 21, 2007]

“The second requirement of a virus-friendly environment – that it should obey a program of coded instructions – is again only quantitatively less true for brains than for cells or computers. We sometimes obey orders from one another, but also we sometimes don't. Nevertheless, it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions. Instructions to genuflect, to bow towards Mecca, to nod one's head rhythmically towards the wall, to shake like a maniac, to "speak in tongues" – the list of such arbitrary and pointless motor patterns offered by religion alone is extensive – are obeyed, if not slavishly, at least with some reasonably high statistical probability.”

Richard Dawkins book Viruses of the Mind

Viruses of the Mind (1993)

Children , World , Religion , Parent

“It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.”

Richard Dawkins

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

Way , Science

“… but the dominance hierarchy itself is not something that natural selection favours or disfavours. What natural selection favours or disfavours is the individual behaviour of which the dominance hierarchy is a manifestation. I would put war and overpopulation in that category.”

Richard Dawkins

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

War , Nature

“The absolute morality that the religious person might profess would include what, stoning people for adultery, death for apostasy, punishment for breaking the Sabbath; these are all things which are religiously based absolute moralities. I don’t think I want an absolute morality. I think I want a morality that is thought-out, reasoned, argued, discussed—based upon, almost say—intelligent design. Can we not design our society which has the sort of morality, the sort of society we want to live in?”

Richard Dawkins

Dawkins on Q&A (), replying to a Muslim man who asked about 'absolute morality'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu7AQTs_y5A

Death , People , Intelligence , Thinking

“Each generation is a filter, a sieve; good genes tend to fall through the sieve into the next generation; bad genes tend to end up in bodies that die young or without reproducing.”

Richard Dawkins

River out of Eden (1995)

“The likelihood is that, in 100,000 years time, we shall either have reverted to wild barbarism, or else civilisation will have advanced beyond all recognition – into colonies in outer space, for instance. In either case, evolutionary extrapolations from present conditions are likely to be highly misleading.”

Richard Dawkins

The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)

Time

“I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

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