Richard Dawkins quotes - page 18

If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed. (Richard Dawkins)
Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose. Accounts of Jesus's resurrection and ascension are about as well-documented as Jack and the Beanstalk. View quote
Richard Dawkins
To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end. View quote
Richard Dawkins
We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. View quote
Richard Dawkins
There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'. View quote
Richard Dawkins
All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do. View quote
Richard Dawkins
I detest 'Jingle Bells,' 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,' and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too. (Richard Dawkins)
It is immoral to brand children with religion. 'This is a Catholic child.' 'That is a Muslim child.' I want everyone to flinch when they hear such a phrase, just as they would if they heard, 'That is a Marxist child.' View quote
Richard Dawkins
The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it. View quote
Richard Dawkins
You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions. View quote
Richard Dawkins
I think a fundamentalist is somebody who believes something unshakably and isn't going to change their mind. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Cloning may be good and it may be bad. Probably it's a bit of both. The question must not be greeted with reflex hysteria but decided quietly, soberly and on it's own merits. We need less emotion and more thought. View quote
Richard Dawkins
Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent. View quote
Richard Dawkins
What's wrong with being elitist if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive? View quote
Richard Dawkins
Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though. View quote
Richard Dawkins
I'm not much given to straight, irony-free hero-worship. View quote
Richard Dawkins
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. (Richard Dawkins)
[It] is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness. View quote
Richard Dawkins
It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too. View quote
Richard Dawkins
I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' or 'Islamic children.' View quote
Richard Dawkins
I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when you're being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have to improvise, you can change sentences around, and they're not exactly right. View quote
Richard Dawkins