30 Best Richard Dawkins Quotes

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

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

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice. – 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

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. – Richard Dawkins

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. – Richard Dawkins

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. – Richard Dawkins

Science is the poetry of reality. – 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. – 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

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. – 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

We are survivors of a continuous lineage that goes back 3 billion years, back to the common ancestor of all life on Earth. – Richard Dawkins

The selfish gene is not a single physical entity but a gene complex that works as a unit. – Richard Dawkins

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. – Richard Dawkins

One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all. – Richard Dawkins

There is a child-like hunger for explanation, and it's a hunger that science is uniquely equipped to satisfy. – Richard Dawkins

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

I am a Darwinist because I believe the only alternatives are Lamarckism or God, neither of which does the job as an explanatory principle. – Richard Dawkins

Read widely, and try to understand the other person's point of view. – Richard Dawkins

The meme is to the transmission of culture what the gene is to the transmission of biological information. – Richard Dawkins

We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA. – Richard Dawkins

Time and again, religion has acted as a barrier to the advance of science. – Richard Dawkins

The human brain runs on software which is largely inherited, but it is also capable of introspection and self-improvement. – Richard Dawkins

You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle would be thrilled, I think, to learn the true explanation of the rainbow. – Richard Dawkins

The God Hypothesis is a scientific hypothesis about the universe, which should be analyzed as skeptically as any other. – Richard Dawkins

We are blessed with the power to understand the universe, and that is a great gift. – Richard Dawkins

The world is divided into things that look designed (like birds and airliners) and things that don't (like rocks and mountains). – Richard Dawkins