Richard Dawkins Quotes

Nature is not cruel, pitiless, indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous -- indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakeable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

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

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

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

They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

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.

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can`t prove that there aren`t any, so shouldn`t we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

What has `theology` ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has `theology` ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? What makes you think that `theology` is a subject at all?

The evidence for evolution is so strong that in order not to believe in evolution you must either be ignorant, stupid or insane.