Richard Dawkins quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Richard Dawkins on Wise Famous Quotes.

There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over.

Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.

We have all been guilty of bending over backwards to be nice to an unworthy but powerful opponent,

All religious beliefs seem weird to people not brought up in them.

The less you think, the more you believe.

Don't ask God to cure cancer and world poverty. He's too busy finding you a parking space and fixing the weather for your barbecue.

I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content.

The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened

It touches every aspect of our social lives, our loving and hating, fighting and cooperating, giving and stealing, our greed and our generosity.

He has no theistic beliefs, but shares the poetic naturalism that the cosmos provokes in

To say that something happened supernaturally is not just to say 'We don't understand it' but to say 'We will never understand it, so don't even try.

I'm afraid the Internet is filled with people using really very intemperate language.

If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature.

I would like people to appreciate science in the same way they appreciate the arts.

There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists.

Without gradualness ... we are back to a miracle.

I'm pretty sure there is some genetic component towards intelligence.

My reverie jumps me into the middle of the period and I conjure the giant, unforgettable figure of Douglas Adams, sadly absent from the feast.

Creative intelligences, being evolved arrived late in the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.

Perhaps, then, the words male and female have no general meaning.

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.

they experience - what they see, hear, think, and

Evolution never looks to the future.

The genes are master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.

The supernatural is ubiquitous in children's entertainment, from Grimm and Hans Andersen to Disney and 'Harry Potter.'

It doesn't hurt my feeling when I get vilified by fundamentalist religious people. I've actually made comedy out of it. I've made light of that.

I do understand people when they say that you destroy the magic of childhood if you encourage too much skeptical questioning.

But if science cannot answer some ultimate question, what makes anybody think that religion can?

Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.

A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural belief. In

The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling - though not to me.

Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.

Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to
moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written
in it?

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

Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam.

When the ancestors of the cheetah first began pursuing the ancestors of the gazelle, neither of them could run as fast as they can today.

It is interesting to wonder whether taxonomists of the future may regret the way our generation messed around with genomes.

Zealand 1893 Australia

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

A triumph of consciousness-raising has been the homosexual hijacking of the word 'gay.'

Evil is a miscellaneous collection of nasty things that nasty people do.

Religious people are atheists about all other gods, atheists only take it one god further.

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

We should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics.

As J. B. S. Haldane said when asked what evidence might contradict evolution, 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.

We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance.

To an honest judge, the alleged marriage between religion and science is a shallow, empty, spin-doctored sham.

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

You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.

It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise.

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.

What is remarkable is the polar opposition between the religiosity of the American public at large and the atheism of the intellectual elite.54

Words are our servants, not our masters.

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

It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.

I've always been very suspicious of the left-right dimension in politics.

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

Religion is the root of quite a lot of evil.

I shall not make an argument ad hominem. My argument is ad bullshitem.

George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden.

Religions do make claims about the universe
the same kinds of claims that scientists make, except they're usually false.

I sympathize with politicians who have to watch every syllable they utter for fear it will be misused by somebody with an agenda.

God is an idea that people believe in and I spend time arguing with people that subscribe to that idea(man made idea).

Sometimes I think it's possible to mistake desire for clarity and talking in a no-nonsense way for aggression.

Evolution normally does not come to a halt, but constantly 'tracks' the changing environment.

What is the colour of abstraction? What is the smell of hope?

There is great variation in brain power all the way from Einstien on one hand to Sarah Palin on the other.

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

When a company seeks a new chief executive officer, or a university a new vice-chancellor, enormous trouble is taken to find the best person.

Nico Tinbergen was my doctoral supervisor, and he was a benign, avuncular sort of influence; everybody loved him.

Beauty arises out of human inspiration.

God likes to have his free lunch and be it too.

There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out.

Science is the poetry of reality.

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

All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation.

If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.

The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.

giving children something with which to surprise their parents is one of the greatest gifts a teacher can bestow.

My thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings are all in my brain. My brain is going to rot.

If there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection.

I didn't have a very starry school career, I was medium to above average, nothing special.

How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.

The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics.

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

My decision to be a scientist was a bit of a drift really, more or less by default.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they ended up manufacturing people.

Religion has at one time or another been thought to fill four main roles in human life: explanation, exhortation, consolation and inspiration.

In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science because it was for the good of the Communist Party.

Don't kid yourself that you're going to live again after you're dead; you're not. Make the most of the one life you've got. Live it to the full.

Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.

Two religions cannot both be right, because they contradict each other, yet they can both be wrong.

The book is true, and if evidence seems to condtradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out not the book.

Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

Beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture, they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

[Invading Iraq] will unite the entire Arab world against the West.

I'm quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.

I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.