Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist, atheist thinker, and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. These Richard Dawkins quotes will motivate you.
Best Richard Dawkins Quotes
- “Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Faith is belief without evidence and reason; coincidentally that’s also the definition of delusion.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Evolution is just a theory? Well, so is gravity and I don’t see you jumping out of buildings.” ~ Richard Dawkins
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“The less you think, the more you believe.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die, because they are never going to be born. The number of people who could be here, in my place, out number the sand grains in the Sahara. If you think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here. The number of events that had to happen in order for you to exist, in order for me to exist… we are privileged to be alive and nd we should make the most of our time on this world.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “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.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him.” ~ Richard Dawkins
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“The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is Enough! Religious faith discourages independent thought, it’s divisive and it’s dangerous.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “It’s a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn’t think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “The idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe.” ~ Richard Dawkins
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“Myths are fun, as long as you don’t confuse them with the truth.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “On one planet [earth], and possibly only one planet in the entire universe, molecules that would normally make nothing more complicated than a chunk of rock, gather themselves together into chunks of rock-sized matter of such staggering complexity that they are capable of running, jumping, swimming, flying, seeing, hearing, capturing and eating other such animated chunks of complexity; capable in some cases of thinking and feeling, and falling in love with yet other chunks of complex matter.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “You believe that all humanity came from Adam and Eve, and humans have not evolved at all since. So tell me; between the two of them, which was black, which was white, and which was Asian?” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA. … This is exactly what we are for. We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object’s sole reason for living.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “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
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“It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well.” ~ Richard Dawkins , Richard Dawkins quotes on evolution
- “Religion: Together we can find the cure.” ~ Richard Dawkins
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“Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.” ~ 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
- “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.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Sometimes in life it is a good idea to stop, sometimes it is a good idea to go on. The trick is to decide when to stop” ~ Richard Dawkins , Richard Dawkins quotes on life
- “Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether they are ‘valid,’ let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.” ~ Richard Dawkins
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“Science is the poetry of reality.” ~ 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
- “It’s a truly disgusting idea that the creator of the universe – capable of inventing the laws of physics and designing the evolutionary process – that this protégé of supernatural intellect couldn’t think of a better way to forgive our sins than to have himself tortured to death.” ~ Richard Dawkins
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“Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur’an. You don’t have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about Nazism.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “What I can’t understand is why you can’t see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing – that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.” ~ Richard Dawkins
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“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.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Next time that somebody tells you something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.” ~ 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
- “Science has eradicated smallpox, can immunise against most previously deadly viruses, can kill most previously deadly bacteria. Theology has done nothing but talk of pestilence as the wages of sin.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “The truth is more magical – in the best and most exciting sense of the word – than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Religious faith, is a state of mind, that leads people to believe in something, it doesn’t matter what, without a whisper of doubt, or a whiff of evidence, and believe so strongly in some cases, that they are prepare to kill and die for it, without the need for further justification.” ~ Richard Dawkins
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“Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’. But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.” ~ Richard Dawkins
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“The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “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.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can’t disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we can’t disprove, we can say that God is very, very improbable.” ~ Richard Dawkins , Richard Dawkins quotes on god
- “The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism – as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’ So did Bertrand Russell: ‘Many people would sooner die than think. In fact, they do.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “If you listen to two people who are arguing about something, and they each of them have passionate faith that they’re right, but they believe different things—they belong to different religions, different faiths, there is nothing they can do to settle their disagreement short of shooting each other, which is what they very often actually do.” ~ Richard Dawkins
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“If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Being dead will be no different from being unborn — I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There is nothing to fear in that.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “It has become almost a cliché 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.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “I am not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where facts are concerned.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “I can’t be sure God does not exist. On a scale of seven, where one means I know he exists, and seven I know he doesn’t, I call myself a six. That doesn’t mean I’m absolutely confident, that I absolutely know, because I don’t.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.” ~ Richard Dawkins
- “Organizing atheists is a bit like herding cats; They are on the whole too intelligent and independent minded to lend themselves to being herded.” ~ Richard Dawkins
