Richard Dawkins Quotes And Sayings

I Don't Think That It's Up To Government To Dictate What People Should Wear.

If Something Is True, No Amount Of Wishful Thinking Will Change It.

From A Darwinian Perspective, It Is Clear What Pain Is Doing. It's A Warning: 'Don't Do That Again.' If You Burn Yourself, You're Never Going To Pick Up A Live Coal Again.

I've Never Been The Sort Of Firebrand That I've Been Made Out To Be. I'm Actually Quite A Mild Person.

Of Course, We Would Love To Know More About The Exact Moment Of Big Bang, But Interposing An Outside Intelligence Does Nothing To Add To That Knowledge, As We Still Know Nothing About The Creation Of That Intelligence.

Although Many Of Us Fear Death, I Think There Is Something Illogical About It.

I Am Baffled By The Way Sophisticated Theologians Who Know Adam And Eve Never Existed Still Keep Talking About It.

There Is No Refutation Of Darwinian Evolution In Existence. If A Refutation Ever Were To Come About, It Would Come From A Scientist, And Not An Idiot.

Something About The Cultural Tradition Of Jews Is Way, Way More Sympathetic To Science And Learning And Intellectual Pursuits Than Islam.

A Good Scientific Theory Is One Which Is Falsifiable, Which Has Not Been Falsified.

The Supernatural Is Ubiquitous In Children's Entertainment, From Grimm And Hans Andersen To Disney And 'Harry Potter.'

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.

Far From Being Demeaning To Human Spiritual Values, Scientific Rationalism Is The Crowning Glory Of The Human Spirit.

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.

Any Teaching Of Falsehoods In Science Classes Should Certainly Be Identified And Stopped By School Inspectors. School Inspectors Should Be Looking At Science Teachings To Make Sure They Are Evidence-based Science.

The Bible Was Written By Fallible Human Beings.

The Child Has No Way Of Knowing What's Good Information.

Tortoises Can Survive For Weeks Without Food Or Water, Easily Long Enough To Float In The Humboldt Current From South America To The Galapagos Islands.

God Stands Out In The Universe As The Most Glaring Of All Superfluous Sore Thumbs.

The Obvious Objections To The Execution Of Saddam Hussein Are Valid And Well Aired. His Death Will Provoke Violent Strife Between Sunni And Shia Muslims, And Between Iraqis In General And The American Occupation Forces.

Words Are Not Trivial. They Matter Because They Raise Consciousness.

Religion Is Capable Of Driving People To Such Dangerous Folly That Faith Seems To Me To Qualify As A Kind Of Mental Illness.

When A Company Seeks A New Chief Executive Officer, Or A University A New Vice-chancellor, Enormous Trouble Is Taken To Find The Best Person.

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.

Disagreements Between Incompatible Beliefs Cannot Be Settled By Reasoned Argument Because Reasoned Argument Is Drummed Out Of Those Trained In Religion From The Cradle.

Science, As Opposed To Technology, Does Violence To Common Sense.

I Can Remember At The Age Of About Six Being Fascinated By The Planets And Learning All About Mars And Venus And Things.

When Brains Get Sufficiently Big, Presumably, As Human Brains Have, Consciousness Seems To Emerge.

There's Branches Of Science Which I Don't Understand; For Example, Physics. It Could Be Said, I Suppose, That I Have Faith That Physicists Understand It Better Than I Do.

Nico Tinbergen Was My Doctoral Supervisor, And He Was A Benign, Avuncular Sort Of Influence; Everybody Loved Him.

Beauty Arises Out Of Human Inspiration.

Teachers Who Help To Open Young Minds Perform A Duty Which Is As Near Sacred As I Will Admit.

I Don't Actually Think 'The Selfish Gene' Is A Very Good Title. I Think That's One Of My Worst Titles.

Biology Is The Study Of Complicated Things That Have The Appearance Of Having Been Designed With A Purpose.

What's Wrong With Being Elitist If You Are Trying To Encourage People To Join The Elite Rather Than Being Exclusive?

I Like To Think 'The God Delusion' Is A Humorous Book. I Think, Actually, It's Full Of Laughs. And People Who Describe It As A Polarizing Book Or As An Aggressive Book, It's Just That Very Often They Haven't Read It.

Public Sharing Is An Important Part Of Science.

If Your Plane Is Being Hijacked By An Armed Man Who, Though Prepared To Take Risks, Presumably Wants To Go On Living, There Is Room For Bargaining.

I Think It's Misleading To Use A Word Like 'God' In The Way Einstein Did. I'm Sorry That Einstein Did. I Think He Was Asking For Trouble, And He Certainly Was Misunderstood.

The Interesting Question Would Be Whether There's A Darwinian Process, A Kind Of Selection Process Whereby Some Memes Are More Likely To Spread Than Others, Because People Like Them, Because They're Popular, Because They're Catchy Or Whatever It Might Be.

I Can Handle Heckling On Evolution Because It's My Own Field.

I'm Not Much Given To Straight, Irony-free Hero-worship.

Genome Sequencing Has Changed Taxonomy.

What's Going To Happen When I Die? I May Be Buried, Or I May Be Cremated, I May Give My Body To Science. I Haven't Decided Yet.

We Are A Unique Ape. We Have Language. Other Animals Have Systems Of Communication That Fall Far Short Of That. They Don't Have The Same Ability To Communicate Complicated Conditionals And What-ifs And Talk About Things That Are Not Present.

Placebos Work.

We Have To Find Our Own Purposes In Life, Which Are Not Derived Directly From Our Scientific History.

The Very Idea That We Get A Moral Compass From Religion Is Horrible. Not Only Should We Not Get Our Moral Compass From Religion, As A Matter Of Fact We Don't.

I Do Understand People When They Say That You Destroy The Magic Of Childhood If You Encourage Too Much Skeptical Questioning.

I'm Fond Of Science Fiction. But Not All Science Fiction. I Like Science Fiction Where There's A Scientific Lesson, For Example - When The Science Fiction Book Changes One Thing But Leaves The Rest Of Science Intact And Explores The Consequences Of That. That's Actually Very Valuable.