Richard Dawkins Quotes
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.
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.
Science is not a body of facts. Science is a method of thinking.
By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
The evidence for evolution grows by the day, and has never been stronger. All respectable scientists in all branches of science accept the fact of evolution.
Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.
It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, mad cow disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.
We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA. This is exactly what we are for. We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object’s sole reason for living.
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.
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.
God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.
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.
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).
Science is the poetry of reality.
Natural selection is a deeply religious idea to me, because it’s all about understanding life.
Science is the best way we have of understanding the universe.
The story of our origins is the single most important story that humans can read.
The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.
The understanding that we are not created beings, but evolved beings, is an incredibly enriching understanding.
The analogy I use is that random variation provided the nuts and bolts and natural selection built the skyscrapers.
The most important invention of a biological species is another biological species.
There is no purpose in biology. Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.
We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library.
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.
People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’. But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up.
It is almost as hard to define ‘evidence’ as it is to define ‘science’, but we needn’t put ourselves through bruising fights about it. To state the obvious, evidence is evidence.
God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.
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.
The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true.
Science is interesting, and if you don’t agree, you can fuck off.
We are the lucky owners of a combination infinitely improbable and wildly precious.
Science is not a religion. It is an honest search for truth.
Just because science can’t explain everything, doesn’t mean that everything is not science.
Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.
Natural selection is not only a process of evolution, it’s a lens through which we can see evolution.
Darwin’s theory of evolution is the most important scientific idea ever put forward.
The universe is bigger than our blinkered brains can ever comprehend.
Our own planet has only just begun to yield its secrets. We are surrounded by enormous unknowns.
The belief in God is completely incompatible with science. The evolutionary explanation of life is science.
Science knows uncertainty and relishes it. Mysteries don’t bother us.
The process of evolution has been documented beyond any reasonable doubt.
The human mind is a product of the evolving brain.
The universe does not care about us. We have to care about each other.
We are all connected to each other, biologically, to the earth, chemically, and to the rest of the universe, atomically.
The natural world is infinitely more interesting and complicated than any supernatural myth.
You don’t need religion to have meaning in your life. There are so many other things: family, friends, love, art, learning.
The theory of evolution is one of the most beautiful and powerful ideas ever conceived.
The greatest gift of science is the ability to learn from our mistakes and improve our understanding of the universe.