Quotes by Richard Dawkins

About Richard Dawkins:

Clinton Richard Dawkins is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and writer. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Publishers like a good buzz, and negative responses sell books just as well as positive ones.

Richard Dawkins

I sympathize with politicians who have to watch every syllable they utter for fear it will be misused by somebody with an agenda.

Richard Dawkins

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.

Richard Dawkins

Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

Richard Dawkins

If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, authority, revelation or faith, they will automatically work out for themselves that they are atheists.

Richard Dawkins

Many people want to send their children to faith schools because they get good exam results, but they're not foolish enough to believe that it's because of faith that they get good exam results.

Richard Dawkins

At least the fundamentalists haven't tried to dilute their message. Their faith is exposed for what it is for all to see.

Richard Dawkins

In the World Wars, people were perfectly able to shoot other people just because they belonged to the wrong country, without ever asking what their opinions were. Faith too is like that.

Richard Dawkins

If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there's something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.

Richard Dawkins

There's branches of science which I don't understand; for example, physics. It could be said, I suppose, that I have faith that physicists understand it better than I do.

Richard Dawkins

Saddam Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran/Iraq war, of the invasion of Kuwait, and of the subsequent era of sanctions culminating in the current invasion.

Richard Dawkins

Evolution never looks to the future.

Richard Dawkins

Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.

Richard Dawkins

The central dogma of the New Testament is that Jesus died as a scapegoat for the sin of Adam and the sins that all we unborn generations might have been contemplating in the future. Adam's sin is perhaps mitigated by the extenuating circumstance that...

Richard Dawkins

We frequently look into the future of mankind and see dangers. We see if we carry on doing what we are doing in 20 years' time there will be no rainforests left, just to use one example. Looking into the future may be one of the reasons that brains e...

Richard Dawkins

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

Richard Dawkins

Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang, but interposing an outside intelligence does nothing to add to that knowledge, as we still know nothing about the creation of that intelligence.

Richard Dawkins

I'm pretty sure there is some genetic component towards intelligence.

Richard Dawkins

You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.

Richard Dawkins

My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physic...

Richard Dawkins

Don't kid yourself that you're going to live again after you're dead; you're not. Make the most of the one life you've got. Live it to the full.

Richard Dawkins

Author Bio

  • NameRichard Dawkins
  • DescriptionEnglish ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author
  • AliasesClinton Richard Dawkins
  • BornMarch 26, 1941
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionEvolutionary Biologist; Ethologist; Science Writer; Popularizer Of Science; Essayist; Theoretical Biologist; Epistemologist; Sociobiologist
  • WorksThe Selfish Gene
  • AwardsFellow Of The Royal Society; Kistler Prize; Michael Faraday Prize; International Cosmos Prize; Lewis Thomas Prize; Shakespeare Prize; Humanist Of The Year