Richard Dawkins is a renowned British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and science author who became popular because of his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene”.
This work introduced the gene-centered view of evolution and the term ‘meme’.
His 1982 book, “The Extended Phenotype”, made a significant contribution to evolutionary biology, suggesting that a gene’s phenotypic effects can stretch beyond an organism’s body, influencing the environment and other organisms.
Known for his stark criticism of creationism and intelligent design, Dawkins, in his 1986 book “The Blind Watchmaker”, refuted the watchmaker analogy arguing against the existence of a supernatural creator.
Instead, he paralleled evolutionary processes to a ‘blind watchmaker’.
Related: Biology Quotes from Scientists to Spark Your Interest
Today, Dawkins is a celebrated science communicator who regularly appears on television and radio to discuss these themes.
Below are some of the handpicked quotes by Richard Dawkins that you would like.
Best Richard Dawkins Quotes
Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings. ~ Richard Dawkins.
The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. ~ Richard Dawkins.
What worries me about religion is that it teaches people to be satisfied with not understanding the world they live in. ~ Richard Dawkins.
My thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings are all in my brain. My brain is going to rot. ~ Richard Dawkins.
A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence. ~ Richard Dawkins.
The evidence for evolution is so compelling that the only way to save the creation theory is to assume that God deliberately planted enormous quantities of evidence to make it look as if evolution had happened. ~ Richard Dawkins.
The idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe. ~ Richard Dawkins.
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. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it? ~ Richard Dawkins.
If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope to eventually understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality that would not imply that the theory of evolution was false. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Nothing is wrong with peace and love. It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ’s followers seem to disagree. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Something pretty mysterious had to give rise to the origin of the universe. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. ~ Richard Dawkins.
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? ~ Richard Dawkins.
The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun. ~ Richard Dawkins.
I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn’t a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one. ~ Richard Dawkins.
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. ~ Richard Dawkins.
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? ~ Richard Dawkins.
Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Popular Richard Dawkins Quotes
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. ~ Richard Dawkins.
It is an astounding fact that we, evolved beings, have brains in our heads which are capable of understanding why we’re here and where we come from and where the world comes from and where the world’s going. ~ Richard Dawkins.
I am thrilled to be alive at time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution. ~ Richard Dawkins.
It is a remarkable coincidence that almost everyone has the same religion as their parents and it always just so happens they’re the right religion. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Let our tribute to the dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe. ~ Richard Dawkins.
I don’t understand why so many people who are sophisticated in science go on believing in God. I wish I did. ~ Richard Dawkins.
The cynic about human nature might say that religious morality is an effective way of keeping people in line. The threat of hell, the reward of heaven, but the rules of the holy books are out of date and often barbaric. ~ Richard Dawkins.
The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the raising of Lazarus, even the Old Testament miracles, all are freely used for religious propaganda, and they are very effective with an audience of unsophisticates and children. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Segregation has no place in the education system. ~ Richard Dawkins.
The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun. ~ Richard Dawkins.
It must be possible to construct life chemically, or in a computer. ~ Richard Dawkins.
The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, nor an eight-level code as in some telephone systems, but a quaternary code with four symbols. The machine code of the genes is uncannily computerlike. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Evolution is just a theory? Well, so is gravity and I don’t see you jumping out of buildings. ~ Richard Dawkins.
I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organized ignorance. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Famous Richard Dawkins Quotes
The majority of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Gravity is not a version of the truth. It is the truth. Anyone who doubts it is invited to jump out a tenth-storey window. ~ Richard Dawkins.
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. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit. ~ Richard Dawkins.
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. ~ 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.
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.
Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. The watchmaker is blind. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Religion is the root of quite a lot of evil. ~ Richard Dawkins.
There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over. ~ Richard Dawkins.
There is no reason to regard God as immune from consideration along the spectrum of probabilities. And there is certainly no reason to suppose that, just because God can be neither proved nor disproved, his probability of existence is 50 per cent. ~ Richard Dawkins.
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. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Great Richard Dawkins Quotes
Some people find clarity threatening. They like muddle, confusion, obscurity. So when somebody does no more than speak clearly it sounds threatening. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Science is the disinterested search for the objective truth about the material world. ~ Richard Dawkins.
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. ~ Richard Dawkins.
It has been convincingly demonstrated that countries where there are high rates of poverty, or high rates of economic inequality, are the countries with the highest rates of religious beliefs. ~ Richard Dawkins.
When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong. ~ Richard Dawkins.
In the beginning was simplicity. ~ Richard Dawkins.
You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I’m talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells. ~ Richard Dawkins.
We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. ~ Richard Dawkins.
We should take astrology seriously. No, I don’t mean we should believe in it. I am talking about fighting it seriously instead of humoring it as a piece of harmless fun. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Science is the poetry of reality. ~ Richard Dawkins.
By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Genome sequencing has changed taxonomy. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun. ~ Richard Dawkins.
You don’t believe that the Earth is round only if you’re an astronaut. You don’t believe Napoleon existed only if you’re a historian. You believe these things because they’re facts, proved by evidence. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Wise Richard Dawkins Quotes
The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg. ~ Richard Dawkins.
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. ~ Richard Dawkins.
It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism. ~ Richard Dawkins.
I am often accused of expressing contempt and despising religious people. I don’t despise religious people, I despise what they stand for. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Let’s get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything. ~ Richard Dawkins.
The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle. ~ Richard Dawkins.
I shall not make an argument ad hominem. My argument is ad bullshitem. ~ Richard Dawkins.
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. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Creationism: God’s gift to the ignorant. ~ Richard Dawkins.
The less you think, the more you believe. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Top Richard Dawkins Quotes
We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. ~ Richard Dawkins.
The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale. ~ Richard Dawkins.
There’s real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Faith is belief without evidence and reason; coincidentally that’s also the definition of delusion. ~ Richard Dawkins.
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. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Do you advocate the Ten Commandments as a guide to the good life? Then I can only presume that you don’t know the Ten Commandments. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Natural selection is anything but random. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Science is interesting, and if you don’t agree, you can f**k off. ~ Richard Dawkins.
There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents. ~ Richard Dawkins.
There’s real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality. ~ Richard Dawkins.
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. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Scientific truth is too beautiful to be sacrificed for the sake of light entertainment or money. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won’t know it, and may even vigorously deny it. ~ Richard Dawkins.
You can make some inferences about a man’s character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered. ~ Richard Dawkins.
The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Profound Richard Dawkins Quotes
Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Religion is a powerful weapon that can be used because it persuades people to do things. And thus it can be used for good or ill. But it should not be a powerful weapon at all. ~ Richard Dawkins.
We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Religion: Together we can find the cure. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colors. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different senses. ~ Richard Dawkins.
If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Writing a computer virus program is child’s play. Any fool can do it, which is why the silly little twerps who do have nothing to be proud of. ~ Richard Dawkins.
The Universe does not owe us meaning. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random. ~ 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.
We’re going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence. ~ Richard Dawkins.
We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. ~ 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.
Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Human beings are just gene machines. ~ Richard Dawkins.
DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. ~ Richard Dawkins.
Not only is science corrosive to religion, but religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp. ~ Richard Dawkins.
There is an attitude in the culture that says that everybody is entitled to their opinion. You got to respect their opinion. No, you damn well haven’t got to respect their opinion. ~ Richard Dawkins.
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. ~ Richard Dawkins.
So these were the 119 top Richard Dawkins quotes on God, science, atheism and religion.
If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other posts on Rachel Carson quotes and Otto von Bismarck quotes.
