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Richard Dawkins

Scientist

Richard Dawkins is a prominent evolutionary biologist and author, known for his thought-provoking perspectives on science, atheism, and the natural world. His work has inspired countless individuals to question religious beliefs and embrace scientific reasoning in understanding life and the universe. The following quotes reflect his sharp intellect, unwavering commitment to evidence-based thinking, and his advocacy for reason and skepticism in the pursuit of knowledge.

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.
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A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.
From The God Delusion
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Topic: Religion
To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries
From The God Delusion
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Topic: Religion
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. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
From Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
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Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
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Topic: Religion
My main reason for scepticism about the Huxley/Sagan theory is that the human brain is demonstrably eager to see faces in random patterns, as we know from scientific evidence, on top of the numerous legends about faces of Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or Mother Teresa, being seen on slices of toast, or pizzas, or patches of damp on a wall. This eagerness is enhanced if the pattern departs from randomness in the specific direction of being symmetrical.
From The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
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Topic: Religion
By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
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Topic: Funny
Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking after himself.
From The God Delusion
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Topic: Religion
Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.
From The God Delusion
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Topic: Religion
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.
From The Selfish Gene
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Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
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Topic: Religion
The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion mixes explosively with (and gives strong sanction to) both. Only the willfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today. Without a doubt it is the prime aggravator of the Middle East. Those of us who have for years politely concealed our contempt for the dangerous collective delusion of religion need to stand up and speak out. Things are different now. ‘All is changed, changed utterly.
From A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love – Essays from Renowned Scientist Richard Dawkins on Evolution and the Examined Life
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Topic: Religion
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
From The God Delusion
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We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
Even those who do not, or cannot, avail themselves of a scientific education, choose to benefit from the technology that is made possible by the scientific education of others.
From A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love – Essays from Renowned Scientist Richard Dawkins on Evolution and the Examined Life
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Topic: Education
Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to
moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written
in it?
From The God Delusion
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Topic: Religion
When people say they are atheists they don’t mean they can’t prove that there are no gods. Strictly speaking, it’s impossible to prove that something does not exist. We don’t positively know there are no gods, just as we can’t prove that there are no fairies or pixies or elves or hobgoblins or leprechauns or pink unicorns; just as we can’t prove that Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy don’t exist. There’s a billion things you can imagine and nobody can disprove.
From Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide to Atheism
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Topic: Religion
When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.
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Topic: Death
Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.
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Topic: Education
It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Television
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.
From The God Delusion
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Topic: Religion
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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
If you don't understand how something
works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don't
know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand
how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis
a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go
to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God.
From The God Delusion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.
From The God Delusion
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Topic: Religion
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.
From The God Delusion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries
From The God Delusion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
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. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
From Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
My main reason for scepticism about the Huxley/Sagan theory is that the human brain is demonstrably eager to see faces in random patterns, as we know from scientific evidence, on top of the numerous legends about faces of Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or Mother Teresa, being seen on slices of toast, or pizzas, or patches of damp on a wall. This eagerness is enhanced if the pattern departs from randomness in the specific direction of being symmetrical.
From The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Funny
Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking after himself.
From The God Delusion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.
From The God Delusion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.
From The Selfish Gene
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion mixes explosively with (and gives strong sanction to) both. Only the willfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today. Without a doubt it is the prime aggravator of the Middle East. Those of us who have for years politely concealed our contempt for the dangerous collective delusion of religion need to stand up and speak out. Things are different now. ‘All is changed, changed utterly.
From A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love – Essays from Renowned Scientist Richard Dawkins on Evolution and the Examined Life
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
From The God Delusion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
Even those who do not, or cannot, avail themselves of a scientific education, choose to benefit from the technology that is made possible by the scientific education of others.
From A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love – Essays from Renowned Scientist Richard Dawkins on Evolution and the Examined Life
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Education
Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to
moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written
in it?
From The God Delusion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
When people say they are atheists they don’t mean they can’t prove that there are no gods. Strictly speaking, it’s impossible to prove that something does not exist. We don’t positively know there are no gods, just as we can’t prove that there are no fairies or pixies or elves or hobgoblins or leprechauns or pink unicorns; just as we can’t prove that Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy don’t exist. There’s a billion things you can imagine and nobody can disprove.
From Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide to Atheism
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Death
Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Education
It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Television
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.
From The God Delusion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
If you don't understand how something
works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don't
know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand
how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis
a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go
to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God.
From The God Delusion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.
From The God Delusion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.
From The God Delusion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries
From The God Delusion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
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. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
From Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
My main reason for scepticism about the Huxley/Sagan theory is that the human brain is demonstrably eager to see faces in random patterns, as we know from scientific evidence, on top of the numerous legends about faces of Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or Mother Teresa, being seen on slices of toast, or pizzas, or patches of damp on a wall. This eagerness is enhanced if the pattern departs from randomness in the specific direction of being symmetrical.
From The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Funny
Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking after himself.
From The God Delusion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.
From The God Delusion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.
From The Selfish Gene
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion mixes explosively with (and gives strong sanction to) both. Only the willfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today. Without a doubt it is the prime aggravator of the Middle East. Those of us who have for years politely concealed our contempt for the dangerous collective delusion of religion need to stand up and speak out. Things are different now. ‘All is changed, changed utterly.
From A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love – Essays from Renowned Scientist Richard Dawkins on Evolution and the Examined Life
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
From The God Delusion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
Even those who do not, or cannot, avail themselves of a scientific education, choose to benefit from the technology that is made possible by the scientific education of others.
From A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love – Essays from Renowned Scientist Richard Dawkins on Evolution and the Examined Life
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Education
Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to
moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written
in it?
From The God Delusion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
When people say they are atheists they don’t mean they can’t prove that there are no gods. Strictly speaking, it’s impossible to prove that something does not exist. We don’t positively know there are no gods, just as we can’t prove that there are no fairies or pixies or elves or hobgoblins or leprechauns or pink unicorns; just as we can’t prove that Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy don’t exist. There’s a billion things you can imagine and nobody can disprove.
From Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide to Atheism
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Death
Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Education
It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Television
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.
From The God Delusion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
If you don't understand how something
works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don't
know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand
how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis
a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go
to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God.
From The God Delusion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion
I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.
From The God Delusion
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Topic: Religion