Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, ethologist, and author from the United Kingdom. He is a well-known scientific popularizer and outspoken atheist. Dawkins was born in Kenya on March 26, 1941. 2. At the time of Dawkins’ birth, his father was stationed in Kenya. In this blog post we have shared 71 most famous Richard Dawkins quotes.
From 1995 to 2008, Richard Dawkins was a Professor of Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. He is a well-known atheist who has criticized creationism and intelligent design.
Dawkins rose to prominence in 1976 with his book The Selfish Gene, which popularized the gene-centered view of evolution and coined the term meme. With his book The Extended Phenotype (1982), he introduced the influential concept that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism’s body, but can extend far into the environment, into evolutionary biology. He established the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science in 2006, and The Clergy Project in 2011.
71 Richard Dawkins Quotes
- “Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.”
2. “Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.”
3. “By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.”
4. “There’s real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality”
5. “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are all born selfish.”
6. “More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.”
7. “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
8. “Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything.”
9. “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.”
10. “Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.”
Famous Richard Dawkins Quotes
11. “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
12. “Unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop being true.”
13. “The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.”
14. “We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”
15. “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.”
14. “If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.”
15. “Many religious people find it hard to imagine how, without religion, one can be good, or would even want to be good.”
16. “Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?”
17. “What shall it profit a male if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his immortal genes?”
18. “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.”
19. “Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.”
20. “The book is true, and if evidence seems to condtradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out not the book.”
Richard Dawkins Best Quotes
21. “We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage.”
22. “If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature.”
23. “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 colours.”
24. “Philosophy and the subjects known as ‘humanities’ are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived.”
25. “It would be so nice if those who oppose evolution would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is that they are opposing.”
26. “There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point”
27. “There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another.”
28. “The purpose of a lecture should not be to impart information. There are books, libraries, nowadays the internet, for that. A lecture should inspire and provoke thought.”
29. “Undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance.”
30. “The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics.”
31. “Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact.”
32. “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”
33. “Individuals are temporary meeting points on the crisscrossing routes that genes take through history.”
34. “It is all too easy to mistake passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will.”
35. “Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence.”
Thought-Provoking Richard Dawkins Quotes
36. “Chance” is just a word expressing ignorance”
37. “I don’t give a damn for anybody’s opinion, I only care about the facts. So I’m not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where factual matters are concerned.”
38. “Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.”
39. “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.”
40. “I don’t care about what is good and what is evil, I care about what is true.”
41. “Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.”
42. “If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine.”
43. “Creative intelligences, being evolved arrived late in the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.”
44. “The genes are master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.”
45. “I am not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where facts are concerned.”
46. “The fact that a question can be phrased in a grammatically correct English sentence doesn’t make it meaningful, or entitle it to our serious attention.”
47. “Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.”
48. “Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.”
49. “Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain’s simulation of the world becomes so complex that it must include a model of itself.”
50. “I am not trying to make a point by telling stories. Chosen examples are never serious evidence for any worthwhile generalization”
51. “A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance”
52. “The habit of questioning authority is one of the most valuable gifts that a book, or a teacher, can give a young would-be scientist.”
53. “We’re going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.”
54. “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”
55. “Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.”
56. “The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear.”
57. “In any case, you won’t get rich doing science, so why do it at all if you undermine the only point of the enterprise by lying?”
58. “If you don’t understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it.”
59. “What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them.”
60. “The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.”
61. “If you don’t understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it.”
62. “You can make some inferences about a man’s character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.”
63. “Relatives share a substantial proportion of their genes. Each selfish gene therefore has its loyalties divided between different bodies.”
64. “We should always be open-minded, but the only good reason to believe that something exists is if there is real evidence that it does.”
65. “Isn’t it remarkable that almost every child follows the same religion as their parents, and it always just happens to be the right religion!”
66. “Words are our servants, not our masters.”
67. “I am passionate about the truth. Passion is very different from fundamentalism.”
68. “He has no theistic beliefs, but shares the poetic naturalism that the cosmos provokes in”
69. “The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness.”
70. “Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness”
71. “There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness, which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence.”