Richard Dawkins

In Britain, you don't usually learn about evolution until you are about 15. I should have thought that you should start at about 8. But I could be wrong about that.

A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a jet plane's exhaust. A great improvement on a simple ballistic shell, it still cannot discriminate particular targets. It could not zero in on a designated New York skyscraper if launched from as far away as Boston.

George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden.

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories.

I think my love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western countries is betraying itself where Islam is concerned.

I've always been very suspicious of the left-right dimension in politics.

The state of Israel seems to owe its very existence to the American Jewish vote, while at the same time consigning the non-religious to political oblivion.

Humans are just a very, very small part of the panoply of life, and it is arguable that in a certain sense, humans have emancipated themselves from Darwinian selection.

Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.

If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle.

The idea of tiny changes cumulated over many steps is an immensely powerful idea, capable of explaining an enormous range of things that would be otherwise inexplicable.

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

Humans have a proven track record in taking over planes by the use of threats, which work because the legitimate pilots value their own lives and those of their passengers.

Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.

Every night of our lives, we dream, and our brain concocts visions which are, at least until we wake up, highly convincing. Most of us have had experiences which are verging on hallucination. It shows the power of the brain to knock up illusions.

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?

We are a unique ape. We have language. Other animals have systems of communication that fall far short of that. They don't have the same ability to communicate complicated conditionals and what-ifs and talk about things that are not present.

Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.

People say I'm shrill and strident.

Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.

Words are not trivial. They matter because they raise consciousness.

There are people who try to get atheists to form a sort of atheist church and have atheist community singsongs and things. I don't see the need for that, but if people want to do it, why shouldn't they?

People like to trace their ancestry.

The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling “ though not to me.

My decision to be a scientist was a bit of a drift really, more or less by default.

One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.

A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence.

I'm quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.

I'm not a good observer. I'm not proud of it.

You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.

I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.

Even if 'going retrograde' or 'moving into Aquarius' were real phenomena, something that planets actually do, what influence could they possibly have on human events? A planet is so far away that its gravitational pull on a new-born baby would be swamped by the gravitational pull of the doctor's paunch.

Segregation has no place in the education system.

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 evolved in the first place.

I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist.

It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.

How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair defends them on grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a school whose head of science believes the world is less than 10,000 years old.

I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.

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.

In Britain, Christianity is dying. Islam, unfortunately, isn't.

The universe doesn't owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn't owe us a nice warm feeling inside.

Coming out as an atheist can cost an academic his or her job in some parts of America, and many choose to keep quiet about their atheism.

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.

All the fossils that we have ever found have always been found in the appropriate place in the time sequence. There are no fossils in the wrong place.

The obvious objections to the execution of Saddam Hussein are valid and well aired. His death will provoke violent strife between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and between Iraqis in general and the American occupation forces.

But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

Why did humans lose their body hair? Why did they start walking on their hind legs? Why did they develop big brains? I think that the answer to all three questions is sexual selection.

I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there's a scientific lesson, for example - when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That's actually very valuable.

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.

Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it.

From a Darwinian perspective, it is clear what pain is doing. It's a warning: 'Don't do that again.' If you burn yourself, you're never going to pick up a live coal again.

I don't feel depressed. I feel elated.

We are survival machines -- robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.

A good scientific theory is one which is falsifiable, which has not been falsified.

I am baffled by the way sophisticated theologians who know Adam and Eve never existed still keep talking about it.

I like to think 'The God Delusion' is a humorous book. I think, actually, it's full of laughs. And people who describe it as a polarizing book or as an aggressive book, it's just that very often they haven't read it.

It is immoral to brand children with religion. 'This is a Catholic child.' 'That is a Muslim child.' I want everyone to flinch when they hear such a phrase, just as they would if they heard, 'That is a Marxist child.'

My thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings are all in my brain. My brain is going to rot.

There are quite a lot of YouTube clips of me that have gone viral. One that I think of is of a young woman at a lecture I was giving - she came from Liberty University, which is a ludicrous religious institution. She said, 'What if you are wrong?' and I answered that rather briefly, and that's gone viral.

My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.

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

The fear of Hell is a very powerful motivation.

God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.

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 he didn't exist.

To put it bluntly, American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.

It is a lamentable observation that because of the way our laws are skewed toward the plaintiff, London has become the libel capital of the world.

In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of 'The Selfish Gene,' I did actually use the metaphor of a 'virus.' So when anybody talks about something going viral on the Internet, that is exactly what a meme is, and it looks as though the word has been appropriated for a subset of that.

A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.

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

DNA is ROM. It can be read millions of times over but only written to once when it is first assembled the birth of the cell in which it resides.

A universe with a creator would be a totally different kind of universe, scientifically speaking, than one without.

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.

I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will.

All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.

If you think about it, 534 members of the U.S. Congress cannot all be religious. That's just statistical nonsense. Many of them are quite well-educated.

Biology is the study of the complex things in the Universe. Physics is the study of the simple ones.

Why are we so obsessed with monogamous fidelity?

What's wrong with being elitist if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive?

I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.

The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it - language, art, science - seemed to have evolved only once. The eye, by contrast, independently evolved 40 times. So, if you were to 'replay' evolution, the eye would almost certainly appear again, whereas the big brain probably wouldn't.

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.

There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists.

To an honest judge, the alleged marriage between religion and science is a shallow, empty, spin-doctored sham.

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.

I once wrote that anybody who believes the world is only 6,000 years old is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.

It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself.

I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.

There is something cheap about magic that works just because it is magic.

Being an atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily, and fully.

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

Tortoises can survive for weeks without food or water, easily long enough to float in the Humboldt Current from South America to the Galapagos Islands.

People believe the only alternative to randomness is intelligent design.

Science is the poetry of reality.

Christopher Hitchens was a great warrior, a magnificent orator, a pugilist and a gentleman. He was kind, but he took no prisoners when arguing with idiots.

We should take astrology seriously. No, I don't mean we should believe in it. I am talking about fighting it seriously instead of humouring it as a piece of harmless fun.

I would like people to appreciate science in the same way they appreciate the arts.

I have begun several projects which were never completed, not necessarily because they failed, but because I got interested in other things.

I think I would abolish schools which systematically inculcate sectarian beliefs.

To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.

Anybody who objects to cloning on principle has to answer to all the identical twins in the world who might be insulted by the thought that there is something offensive about their very existence. Clones are simply identical twins.