Richard Dawkins quote: "Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: It gives them something to do."

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no des...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Bishops sit in the House of Lords automatically.
RICHARD DAWKINS

There are risks in the sheer brevity of Twitter, and it's actually quite an elegant art reducing...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Anybody who has something sensible or worthwhile to say should be able to say it calmly and soberly,...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discour...
RICHARD DAWKINS

It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is soc...
RICHARD DAWKINS

How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyo...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The Darwinian theory is in principle capable of explaining life. No other theory that has ever been...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Human...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and p...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. Duri...
RICHARD DAWKINS

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous pl...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like...
RICHARD DAWKINS

It's been suggested that if the supernaturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lo...
RICHARD DAWKINS

It is possible to enjoy the Mozart concerto without being able to play the clarinet. In fact, you ca...
RICHARD DAWKINS

My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Religions are not imaginative, not poetic, not soulful. On the contrary, they are parochial, small-m...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Same religion that saves - Damns You
RICHARD DAWKINS

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and rewar...
RICHARD DAWKINS

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove t...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in pri...
RICHARD DAWKINS

...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessari...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakeable truth through the power of institutions a...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Rather than say he's an atheist, a friend of mine says, 'I'm a tooth fairy agnostic,'...
RICHARD DAWKINS

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't pro...
RICHARD DAWKINS

To an honest judge, the alleged marriage between religion and science is a shallow, empty, spin-doct...
RICHARD DAWKINS

I do sometimes accuse people of ignorance, but that is not intended to be an insult. I'm ignoran...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose. Accounts ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Einstein was adamant in rejecting all ideas of a personal god.
RICHARD DAWKINS

Don't kid yourself that you're going to live again after you're dead; you're not. Ma...
RICHARD DAWKINS

I'm sure Obama is an atheist; I'm sure Kennedy was an atheist, but I doubt if Pope Frank is.
RICHARD DAWKINS

One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers whi...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.
RICHARD DAWKINS

We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Selfish genes actually explain altruistic individuals, and to me that's crystal-clear.
RICHARD DAWKINS

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.
RICHARD DAWKINS

Even if you believe a creator god invented the laws of physics, would you so insult him as to sugges...
RICHARD DAWKINS

My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, b...
RICHARD DAWKINS

A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence.
RICHARD DAWKINS

The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling - thou...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we tho...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Beauty arises out of human inspiration.
RICHARD DAWKINS

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
RICHARD DAWKINS

Evolution never looks to the future.
RICHARD DAWKINS

The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.
RICHARD DAWKINS

We have a huge amount of DNA in common with jellyfish.
RICHARD DAWKINS

Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Natural selection is anything but random.
RICHARD DAWKINS

God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the envir...
RICHARD DAWKINS

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
RICHARD DAWKINS

I'm fascinated by the idea that genetics is digital. A gene is a long sequence of coded letters,...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a p...
RICHARD DAWKINS

I live in a post-Christian world in Oxford; it is quite rare to meet somebody who is religious in ac...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an inno...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say i...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The interesting question would be whether there's a Darwinian process, a kind of selection proce...
RICHARD DAWKINS

I did a film that's on YouTube of me reading hate mail with a woman playing the cello in the bac...
RICHARD DAWKINS

If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of s...
RICHARD DAWKINS

When a company seeks a new chief executive officer, or a university a new vice-chancellor, enormous ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we tho...
RICHARD DAWKINS

If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical li...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Just as I wouldn't expect a gynecologist to have a debate with somebody who believes in the Stor...
RICHARD DAWKINS

There are many very educated people who are religious, but they're not creationists.
RICHARD DAWKINS

Don't feel embarrassed if you've never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks a...
RICHARD DAWKINS

If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
RICHARD DAWKINS

We should take astrology seriously. No, I don't mean we should believe in it. I am talking about...
RICHARD DAWKINS

In the 1920s and 1930s, scientists from both the political left and right would not have found the i...
RICHARD DAWKINS

An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and sprea...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented...
RICHARD DAWKINS

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes.
RICHARD DAWKINS

We are a unique ape. We have language. Other animals have systems of communication that fall far sho...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Discrimination is not liberal. Arguing against discrimination is not intolerance.
RICHARD DAWKINS

Christopher Hitchens was a great warrior, a magnificent orator, a pugilist and a gentleman. He was k...
RICHARD DAWKINS

I think my love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that ther...
RICHARD DAWKINS

I have a strong feeling that the subject of evolution is beautiful without the excuse of creationist...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follo...
RICHARD DAWKINS

If your plane is being hijacked by an armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants...
RICHARD DAWKINS

I am baffled by the way sophisticated theologians who know Adam and Eve never existed still keep tal...
RICHARD DAWKINS

For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria...
RICHARD DAWKINS

A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barb...
RICHARD DAWKINS

A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a jet plane'...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The world is well supplied with spiders whose male ancestors died after mating. The world is bereft ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it's a time for reflection,...
RICHARD DAWKINS

It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think o...
RICHARD DAWKINS

I detest 'Jingle Bells,' 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,'...
RICHARD DAWKINS

I mean I think that when you've got a big brain, when you find yourself planted in a world with ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingle...
RICHARD DAWKINS

I suppose I'm a cultural Anglican, and I see evensong in a country church through much the same ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

People like to trace their ancestry.
RICHARD DAWKINS

What Darwinian theory shows us is that all human races are extremely close to each other. None of th...
RICHARD DAWKINS

What's going to happen when I die? I may be buried, or I may be cremated, I may give my body to ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Humans are just a very, very small part of the panoply of life, and it is arguable that in a certain...
RICHARD DAWKINS

We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.
RICHARD DAWKINS

There is no refutation of Darwinian evolution in existence. If a refutation ever were to come about,...
RICHARD DAWKINS

From a Darwinian perspective, it is clear what pain is doing. It's a warning: 'Don't do ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

We've all been brought up with the view that religion has some kind of special privileged status...
RICHARD DAWKINS

You could give

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests,...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the te...
RICHARD DAWKINS

We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us...
RICHARD DAWKINS

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because th...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Of course in science there are things that are open to doubt and things need to be discussed. But am...
RICHARD DAWKINS

As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival wi...
RICHARD DAWKINS

I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like &#...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned a...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about...
RICHARD DAWKINS

If you were to actually travel around schools and universities and listen in on lectures about evolu...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The very idea of supernatural magic - including miracles - is incoherent, devoid of sensible meaning...
RICHARD DAWKINS

When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructi...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Let us understand Darwinism so we can walk in the opposite direction when it comes to setting up soc...
RICHARD DAWKINS

They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate ratio...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Nature is not cruel, pitiless, indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.
RICHARD DAWKINS

What has 'theology' ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has 'theology' ever said ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

What's wrong with being elitist if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather t...
RICHARD DAWKINS

I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that i...
RICHARD DAWKINS

You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Passion for passion, an evangelical Christian and I may be evenly matched. But we are not equally fu...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated soci...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The earliest books in the New Testament to be written were the Epistles, not the Gospels. It's a...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Even if 'going retrograde' or 'moving into Aquarius' were real phenomena, something ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine...
RICHARD DAWKINS

George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden.
RICHARD DAWKINS

Any teaching of falsehoods in science classes should certainly be identified and stopped by school i...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The Bible was written by fallible human beings.
RICHARD DAWKINS

All the fossils that we have ever found have always been found in the appropriate place in the time ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

[Evolution is] a theory in a special philosophical sense of science, but in terms of ordinary laymen...
RICHARD DAWKINS

God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs.
RICHARD DAWKINS

I think that people in the Bible Belt are far less monolithically religious than many people imagine...
RICHARD DAWKINS

I certainly would absolutely never do what some of my American colleagues do and object to religious...
RICHARD DAWKINS

I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the po...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Many people want to send their children to faith schools because they get good exam results, but the...
RICHARD DAWKINS

A good theory explains a lot but postulates little.
RICHARD DAWKINS

The usefulness of science is sometimes exaggerated. You'd never talk about music being useful or...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in pri...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Cloning may be good and it may be bad. Probably it's a bit of both. The question must not be greeted...
RICHARD DAWKINS

God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the envir...
RICHARD DAWKINS

I think there is a sort of box-ticking mentality. Not just in the teaching profession. You hear abou...
RICHARD DAWKINS

What is illiberal is not persuasion but imposition of one's views.
RICHARD DAWKINS

I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to refle...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.
RICHARD DAWKINS

Saddam Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran/Iraq war, of ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it - language, art, scienc...
RICHARD DAWKINS

If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against y...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The obvious objections to the execution of Saddam Hussein are valid and well aired. His death will p...
RICHARD DAWKINS

I like to think 'The God Delusion' is a humorous book. I think, actually, it's full of l...
RICHARD DAWKINS

There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Although many of us fear death, I think there is something illogical about it.
RICHARD DAWKINS

I sympathize with politicians who have to watch every syllable they utter for fear it will be misuse...
RICHARD DAWKINS

In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of 'The Selfish Gene,' I d...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.
RICHARD DAWKINS

I've never been the sort of firebrand that I've been made out to be. I'm actually quite ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions an...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the h...
RICHARD DAWKINS

It is a lamentable observation that because of the way our laws are skewed toward the plaintiff, Lon...
RICHARD DAWKINS

There are quite a lot of YouTube clips of me that have gone viral. One that I think of is of a young...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations ha...
RICHARD DAWKINS

There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

A triumph of consciousness-raising has been the homosexual hijacking of the word 'gay.'
RICHARD DAWKINS

Every night of our lives, we dream, and our brain concocts visions which are, at least until we wake...
RICHARD DAWKINS

If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing fo...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale
RICHARD DAWKINS

Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought,...
RICHARD DAWKINS

To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect o...
RICHARD DAWKINS

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous pl...
RICHARD DAWKINS

I don't feel depressed. I feel elated.
RICHARD DAWKINS

I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The central dogma of the New Testament is that Jesus died as a scapegoat for the sin of Adam and the...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible. Not only should we not get our ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

I was never much bothered about moral questions like, 'How could there be a good God when there&...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Осьминог ничем не похож на мышь, а оба они сильно отлич�...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Некоторые критики ошибочно считают, что «Эгоистичный �...
RICHARD DAWKINS

We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules kno...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Earlier than about 10,000 years ago, all human populations were hunter gatherers. Soon, probably non...
RICHARD DAWKINS

But the very fact that Darwinism is true makes it even more important for us to fight against the na...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities th...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Darwin himself said as much: 'If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Darwin singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: 'To suppose that the eye wi...
RICHARD DAWKINS

A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of re...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The whole idea of creating saints, it's pure 'Monty Python.' They have to clock up two m...
RICHARD DAWKINS

It is a strange fact, incidentally, that religious apologists love the anthropic principle. For some...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious
defence? One might have supp...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly depa...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Though the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consumin...
RICHARD DAWKINS

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children,...
RICHARD DAWKINS

The truly adult view [...] is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose ...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independen...
RICHARD DAWKINS

If you don't understand how something
works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You d...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to
moral rectitude have the slightest n...
RICHARD DAWKINS

Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: It gives them something to do.

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Richard Dawkins

Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: It gives them something to do.

Richard Dawkins

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