Richard Dawkins Quotes
Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.
Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
Faith is belief without evidence and reason; coincidentally that's also the definition of delusion.
Evolution is just a theory? Well, so is gravity and I don't see you jumping out of buildings.
Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him.
How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.
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 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.
Don't ask God to cure cancer and world poverty. He's too busy finding you a parking space and fixing the weather for your barbecue.
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.
It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.
Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well.
We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.
If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.
Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.
Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur'an. You don't have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about Nazism.
I detest 'Jingle Bells,' 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,' and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.
Faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.
Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.
Do you really mean the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward? That's not morality, that's just sucking up.
Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.
Science has eradicated smallpox, can immunise against most previously deadly viruses, can kill most previously deadly bacteria. Theology has done nothing but talk of pestilence as the wages of sin.
Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it.
It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise.
Sometimes in life it is a good idea to stop,sometimes it is a good idea to go on. The trick is to decide when to stop
For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.
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).
We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so.
If you're willing to answer yes to a God outside of nature, then there's nothing inconsistent with God on rare occasions choosing to invade the natural world in a way that appears miraculous.
I think what I'd really like to see would be a mass consciousness-raising movement so that we would all become vegetarian.
The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is Enough! Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's divisive and it's dangerous.
Organizing atheists is a bit like herding cats; They are on the whole too intelligent and independent minded to lend themselves to being herded.
Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.
Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science.
You believe that all humanity came from Adam and Eve, and humans have not evolved at all since. So tell me; between the two of them, which was black, which was white, and which was Asian?
Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose. Accounts of Jesus's resurrection and ascension are about as well-documented as Jack and the Beanstalk.
We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes.