Richard Dawkins's Quotes

I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.

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

My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.

I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.

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.

Evolution never looks to the future.

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

I don't feel depressed. I feel elated.

I don't know what to think about magic and fairy tales.

I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist.

I love words.

I was confirmed at my prep school at the age of 13.

The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.

When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.

I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' or 'Islamic children.'

What has 'theology' ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has 'theology' ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? What makes you think that 'theology' is a subject at all?

Of course in science there are things that are open to doubt and things need to be discussed. But among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know.

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research.

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.

I mean I think that when you've got a big brain, when you find yourself planted in a world with a brain big enough to understand quite a lot of what you see around you, but not everything, you naturally fall to thinking about the deep mysteries. Where do we come from? Where does the world come from? Where does the universe come from?

Science coverage could be improved by the recognition that science is timeless, and therefore science stories should not need to be pegged to an item in the news.

Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.

It's an important point to realize that the genetic programming of our lives is not fully deterministic. It is statistical - it is in any animal merely statistical - not deterministic.

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

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.

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

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

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.

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence.

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?

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

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

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

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

If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, authority, revelation or faith, they will automatically work out for themselves that they are atheists.

It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.

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

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.

The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.

My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.

Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.

Nothing is wrong with peace and love. It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ's followers seem to disagree.

Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.

A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.

The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

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.

Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today.

Only the gentle are ever really strong.

If a man can bridge the gap between life and death, if he can live on after he's dead, then maybe he was a great man.

The gratification comes in the doing, not in the results.

Trust and belief are two prime considerations. You must not allow yourself to be opinionated.

Being a good actor isn't easy. Being a man is even harder. I want to be both before I'm done.

I want to be a Texan 24 hours a day.

Being an actor is the loneliest thing in the world. You are all alone with your concentration and imagination, and that's all you have.

An actor must interpret life, and in order to do so must be willing to accept all the experiences life has to offer. In fact, he must seek out more of life than life puts at his feet.

I also became close to nature, and am now able to appreciate the beauty with which this world is endowed.

To me, acting is the most logical way for people's neuroses to manifest themselves, in this great need we all have to express ourselves.

There is no way to be truly great in this world. We are all impaled on the crook of conditioning.

The only greatness for man is immortality.

Studying cows, pigs and chickens can help an actor develop his character. There are a lot of things I learned from animals. One was that they couldn't hiss or boo me.

To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty; to interpret it his problem; and to express it his dedication.

To my way of thinking, an actor's course is set even before he's out of the cradle.

When an actor plays a scene exactly the way a director orders, it isn't acting. It's following instructions. Anyone with the physical qualifications can do that.

But you can't show some far off idyllic conception of behavior if you want the kids to come and see the picture. You've got to show what it's really like, and try to reach them on their own grounds.

I think the one thing this picture shows that's new is the psychological disproportion of the kids' demands on the parents. Parents are often at fault, but the kids have some work to do, too.