Quotes By Richard Dawkins

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

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.

Natural selection is anything but random.

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

I don't feel depressed. I feel elated.

The universe doesn't owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn't owe us a nice warm feeling inside.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I once wrote that anybody who believes the world is only 6,000 years old is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.

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?

It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have.

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?

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

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.

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

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?

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

If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle.

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

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

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.

Evolution never looks to the future.

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

Something pretty mysterious had to give rise to the origin of the universe.

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.