Richard Dawkins quotes

Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist and prominent science writer, widely known for his advocacy of atheism and scientific rationalism. His books, such as "The Selfish Gene" and "The God Delusion," have influenced popular understanding of evolution and religion. He continues to be a leading voice in debates about science, religion, and reason. Here are 475 of his quotes:

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

Richard Dawkins

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

Richard Dawkins

Isn'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

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

Richard Dawkins

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

Richard Dawkins

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

Richard Dawkins

But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

Richard Dawkins

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 meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

Richard Dawkins

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.

Richard Dawkins

We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.

Richard Dawkins

They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

Richard Dawkins

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

Richard Dawkins

One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.

Richard Dawkins

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

Richard Dawkins

I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.

Richard Dawkins

I'm sure Obama is an atheist, I'm sure Kennedy was an atheist, but I doubt if Pope Frank is.

Richard Dawkins

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isnt it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it This is how I answer when I am askedas I am surprisingly oftenwhy I bother to get up in the mornings.

Richard Dawkins

My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a 'they' as opposed to a 'we' can be identified at all.

Richard Dawkins

Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It's a sort of crime against childhood.

Richard Dawkins

We don't need fossils – the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution.

Richard Dawkins

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