Richard Dawkins Quotes And Sayings

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 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.

If You Were To Actually Travel Around Schools And Universities And Listen In On Lectures About Evolution, You Might Find A Fairly Substantial Fraction Of Young People, Without Knowing What It Is They Disapprove Of, Think They Disapprove Of It, Because They've Been Brought Up To.

There Are People Who Try To Get Atheists To Form A Sort Of Atheist Church And Have Atheist Community Singsongs And Things. I Don't See The Need For That, But If People Want To Do It, Why Shouldn't They?

Don't Kid Yourself That You're Going To Live Again After You're Dead; You're Not. Make The Most Of The One Life You've Got. Live It To The Full.

Rather Than Say He's An Atheist, A Friend Of Mine Says, 'I'm A Tooth Fairy Agnostic,' Meaning He Can't Disprove God But Thinks God Is About As Likely As The Tooth Fairy.

A Universe With A Creator Would Be A Totally Different Kind Of Universe, Scientifically Speaking, Than One Without.

A Guided Missile Corrects Its Trajectory As It Flies, Homing In, Say, On The Heat Of A Jet Plane's Exhaust. A Great Improvement On A Simple Ballistic Shell, It Still Cannot Discriminate Particular Targets. It Could Not Zero In On A Designated New York Skyscraper If Launched From As Far Away As Boston.

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.

Sometimes I Think It's Possible To Mistake Desire For Clarity And Talking In A No-nonsense Way For Aggression.

I Have Begun Several Projects Which Were Never Completed, Not Necessarily Because They Failed, But Because I Got Interested In Other Things.

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?

We Should Take Astrology Seriously. No, I Don't Mean We Should Believe In It. I Am Talking About Fighting It Seriously Instead Of Humouring It As A Piece Of Harmless Fun.

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 Live In A Post-christian World In Oxford; It Is Quite Rare To Meet Somebody Who Is Religious In Academic Life Now, And There Is Absolutely No Tendency For Rioting And Mayhem, And It Is Extremely Civilised.

I Have A Strong Feeling That The Subject Of Evolution Is Beautiful Without The Excuse Of Creationists Needing To Be Bashed.

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.

Darwin Gives Courage To The Rest Of Science That We Shall End Up Understanding Literally Everything, Springing From Almost Nothing - A Thought Extremely Hard To Comprehend And Believe.

If You Set Out In A Spaceship To Find The One Planet In The Galaxy That Has Life, The Odds Against Your Finding It Would Be So Great That The Task Would Be Indistinguishable, In Practice, From Impossible.

The Meme For Blind Faith Secures Its Own Perpetuation By The Simple Unconscious Expedient Of Discouraging Rational Inquiry.

Christopher Hitchens Was A Great Warrior, A Magnificent Orator, A Pugilist And A Gentleman. He Was Kind, But He Took No Prisoners When Arguing With Idiots.

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.

Science - Or The Products Of Science Like Technology - Is Just A Way Of Achieving Something Real, Something That Happens, Something That Works.

There Does Seem To Be A Sense In Which Physics Has Gone Beyond What Human Intuition Can Understand. We Shouldn't Be Too Surprised About That Because We're Evolved To Understand Things That Move At A Medium Pace At A Medium Scale. We Can't Cope With The Very Tiny Scale Of Quantum Physics Or The Very Large Scale Of Relativity.

It's Very Likely That Most Mammals Have Consciousness, And Probably Birds, Too.

I Accept That There May Be Things Far Grander And More Incomprehensible Than We Can Possibly Imagine.

I Don't Know What To Think About Magic And Fairy Tales.

If You Look Up At The Milky Way Through The Eyes Of Carl Sagan, You Get A Feeling In Your Chest Of Something Greater Than Yourself. And It Is. But It's Not Supernatural.

The Idea Of An Afterlife Where You Can Be Reunited With Loved Ones Can Be Immensely Consoling - Though Not To Me.

For Me, The Level At Which Natural Selection Causes The Phenomenon Of Adaptation Is The Level Of The Replicator - The Gene.

Einstein Was Adamant In Rejecting All Ideas Of A Personal God.

If We Are Too Friendly To Nice, Decent Bishops, We Run The Risk Of Buying Into The Fiction That There's Something Virtuous About Believing Things Because Of Faith Rather Than Because Of Evidence. We Run The Risk Of Betraying Scientific Enlightenment.

The Word 'Excess' Has No Meaning For A Male.

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?

'What Is The Purpose Of The Universe?' Is A Silly Question.

Let Us Understand What Our Own Selfish Genes Are Up To Because We May Then At Least Have The Chance To Upset Their Designs.

All The Fossils That We Have Ever Found Have Always Been Found In The Appropriate Place In The Time Sequence. There Are No Fossils In The Wrong Place.

I Think The World's Always A Better Place If People Are Filled With Understanding.

I Would Like To Find A Way In Which People In Saudi Arabia Could Learn That They Can Be Something Other Than A Muslim. Some People May Not Realize This. Of Course, There Is The Problem That You Can Get In Trouble Or Get Stoned.

The Very Idea Of Supernatural Magic - Including Miracles - Is Incoherent, Devoid Of Sensible Meaning.

A Constellation Is Not An Entity At All, Not The Kind Of Thing That Uranus, Or Anything Else, Can Sensibly Be Said To 'Move Into.'

I Am One Of Those Scientists Who Feels That It Is No Longer Enough Just To Get On And Do Science. We Have To Devote A Significant Proportion Of Our Time And Resources To Defending It From Deliberate Attack From Organised Ignorance.