Richard Dawkins: Quotes about the world

Richard Dawkins is English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. Explore interesting quotes on world.

Richard Dawkins: 644 quotes33 likes

“What worries me about religion is that it teaches people to be satisfied with not understanding the world they live in.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Heart Of The Matter: God Under The Microscope | BBC (1996)
Variant: [... ] one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.
Source: The God Delusion

“There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality”

Richard Dawkins

The Enemies of Reason, "Slaves to Superstition" [1.01], 13 August 2007, timecode 00:38:16ff
The Enemies of Reason (August 2007)
Variant: Science is the poetry of reality.
Context: The word 'mundane' has come to mean boring and dull, and it really shouldn't. It should mean the opposite because it comes from the latin 'mundus', meaning the world, and the world is anything but dull; the world is wonderful. There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.

“THE MAJORITY of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all”

Richard Dawkins

“The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realise that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life and about why we're here. We have the opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors ever. That is such an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to understand.”

Richard Dawkins

An Interview by Sheena McDonald (1995)

“[I]sn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?”

Richard Dawkins

Source: Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

“If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.”

Richard Dawkins book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

Source: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

“My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.”

Richard Dawkins

Source: The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

“Though the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth consuming, hostility provoking rituals, the anti-factual, counter-productive fantasies of religion.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion

“Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complex that it must include a model of itself.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene

“Once again, modern theologians will protest that the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac should not be taken as literal fact. And, once again, the appropriate response is twofold. First, many many people, even to this day, do take the whole of their scripture to be literal fact, and they have a great deal of political power over the rest of us, especially in the United States and in the Islamic world. Second, if not as literal fact, how should we take the story? As an allegory? Then an allegory for what? Surely morals could one derive from this appalling story? Remember, all I am trying to establish for the moment is that we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from scripture. Or, if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty. But then we must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are religious or not.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 275 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007

“There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism.”

Richard Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 9 “Puncturing Punctuationism” (p. 250)

“You see, if you say something positive like the whole of life – all living things – is descended from a single common ancestor which lived about 4,000 million years ago and that we are all cousins, well that is an exceedingly important and true thing to say and that is what I want to say. Somebody who is religious sees that as threatening and so I am represented as attacking religion, and I am forced into responding to their reaction. But you do not have to see my main purpose as attacking religion. Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. 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. And that is what is so exciting for me.”

Richard Dawkins

[1995-04-28, Kam Patel, Going the whole hog, Times Higher Education, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=97718&sectioncode=26]

“To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

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

“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)

“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

“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)

“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) <br class="br">Twitter

“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