Richard Dawkins Quotes And Sayings

In Britain, You Don't Usually Learn About Evolution Until You Are About 15. I Should Have Thought That You Should Start At About 8. But I Could Be Wrong About That.

If You Read Islamic Creationist Literature, It's Pretty Much Lifted From American Evangelical Literature.

Humans Have A Proven Track Record In Taking Over Planes By The Use Of Threats, Which Work Because The Legitimate Pilots Value Their Own Lives And Those Of Their Passengers.

An Internet Meme Is A Hijacking Of The Original Idea. Instead Of Mutating By Random Change And Spreading By A Form Of Darwinian Selection, Internet Memes Are Altered Deliberately By Human Creativity. There Is No Attempt At Accuracy Of Copying, As With Genes - And As With Memes In Their Original Version.

Bereavement Is Terrible, Of Course. And When Somebody You Love Dies, It's A Time For Reflection, A Time For Memory, A Time For Regret.

I Would Like People To Appreciate Science In The Same Way They Appreciate The Arts.

I Sympathize With Politicians Who Have To Watch Every Syllable They Utter For Fear It Will Be Misused By Somebody With An Agenda.

I'm Pretty Sure There Is Some Genetic Component Towards Intelligence.

The Usefulness Of Science Is Sometimes Exaggerated. You'd Never Talk About Music Being Useful Or Art Being Useful.

I Didn't Know Children Were Expected To Have Literary Heroes, But I Certainly Had One, And I Even Identified With Him At One Time: Doctor Dolittle, Whom I Now Half Identify With The Charles Darwin Of Beagle Days.

My Decision To Be A Scientist Was A Bit Of A Drift Really, More Or Less By Default.

Intelligent Life On A Planet Comes Of Age When It First Works Out The Reason For Its Own Existence.

The Universe Doesn't Owe Us Condolence Or Consolation; It Doesn't Owe Us A Nice Warm Feeling Inside.

Compassionate Doctors Sometimes Lie To Patients About The Severity Of Their Condition, And It Is Not Always Wrong To Do So.

Many People Want To Send Their Children To Faith Schools Because They Get Good Exam Results, But They're Not Foolish Enough To Believe That It's Because Of Faith That They Get Good Exam Results.

Islands Are Natural Workshops Of Evolution.

Evil Is A Miscellaneous Collection Of Nasty Things That Nasty People Do.

I Do Sometimes Accuse People Of Ignorance, But That Is Not Intended To Be An Insult. I'm Ignorant Of Lots Of Things. Ignorance Is Something That Can Be Remedied By Education.

Astrology Is An Aesthetic Affront. It Cheapens Astronomy, Like Using Beethoven For Commercial Jingles.

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.

Natural Selection Will Not Remove Ignorance From Future Generations.

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.

Secularism Is Categorically Not Saying That The Religious May Not Speak Out Publicly Or Have A Say In Public Life. It Is About Saying That Religion Alone Should Not Confer A Privileged Say In Public Life, Or Greater Influence On It. It Really Is As Simple As That.

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.

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.

The Essence Of Life Is Statistical Improbability On A Colossal Scale.

Religion Is About Turning Untested Belief Into Unshakable Truth Through The Power Of Institutions And The Passage Of Time.

Nothing Is Wrong With Peace And Love. It Is All The More Regrettable That So Many Of Christ's Followers Seem To Disagree.

A Delusion Is Something That People Believe In Despite A Total Lack Of Evidence.

My Personal Feeling Is That Understanding Evolution Led Me To Atheism.

Physicists Are Working On The Big Bang, And One Day They May Or May Not Solve It.

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.

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've All Been Brought Up With The View That Religion Has Some Kind Of Special Privileged Status. You're Not Allowed To Criticise It.

I'm Sure Obama Is An Atheist; I'm Sure Kennedy Was An Atheist, But I Doubt If Pope Frank Is.

Coming Out As An Atheist Can Cost An Academic His Or Her Job In Some Parts Of America, And Many Choose To Keep Quiet About Their Atheism.

I Do Disapprove Very Strongly Of Labelling Children, Especially Young Children, As Something Like 'Catholic Children' Or 'Protestant Children' Or 'Islamic Children.'

I Detest 'Jingle Bells,' 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer,' And The Obscene Spending Bonanza That Nowadays Seems To Occupy Not Just December, But November And Much Of October, Too.

When You Make Machines That Are Capable Of Obeying Instructions Slavishly, And Among Those Instructions Are 'Duplicate Me' Instructions, Then Of Course The System Is Wide Open To Exploitation By Parasites.

I Think My Love Of Truth And Honesty Forces Me To Notice That The Liberal Intelligentsia Of Western Countries Is Betraying Itself Where Islam Is Concerned.

In The Original Introduction To The Word Meme In The Last Chapter Of 'The Selfish Gene,' I Did Actually Use The Metaphor Of A 'Virus.' So When Anybody Talks About Something Going Viral On The Internet, That Is Exactly What A Meme Is, And It Looks As Though The Word Has Been Appropriated For A Subset Of That.

Anybody Who Has Something Sensible Or Worthwhile To Say Should Be Able To Say It Calmly And Soberly, Relying On The Words Themselves To Convey His Meaning, Without Resorting To Yelling.

Even If You Believe A Creator God Invented The Laws Of Physics, Would You So Insult Him As To Suggest That He Might Capriciously And Arbitrarily Violate Them In Order To Walk On Water, Or Turn Water Into Wine As A Cheap Party Trick At A Wedding?

There Are Quite A Lot Of Youtube Clips Of Me That Have Gone Viral. One That I Think Of Is Of A Young Woman At A Lecture I Was Giving - She Came From Liberty University, Which Is A Ludicrous Religious Institution. She Said, 'What If You Are Wrong?' And I Answered That Rather Briefly, And That's Gone Viral.

Our Animal Origins Are Constantly Lurking Behind, Even If They Are Filtered Through Complicated Social Evolution.

We Are All Atheists About Most Of The Gods That Societies Have Ever Believed In. Some Of Us Just Go One God Further.

Religious Fanatics Want People To Switch Off Their Own Minds, Ignore The Evidence, And Blindly Follow A Holy Book Based Upon Private 'Revelation'.

Don't Feel Embarrassed If You've Never Heard Of William Lane Craig. He Parades Himself As A Philosopher, But None Of The Professors Of Philosophy Whom I Consulted Had Heard His Name, Either.

Saddam Hussein Could Have Provided Irreplaceable Help To Future Historians Of The Iran/iraq War, Of The Invasion Of Kuwait, And Of The Subsequent Era Of Sanctions Culminating In The Current Invasion.

You Can't Even Begin To Understand Biology, You Can't Understand Life, Unless You Understand What It's All There For, How It Arose - And That Means Evolution.