People - Dr. Richard Dawkins - Quotations

Overview

Quotations

Publications

Many quotations taken from Richard Dawkin's lectures and writing reflect his ideals:

• "Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun."
   
• "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."
   
• "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."
   
• "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction."
   
• "I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."
   
• "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 [2001] changed all that."
   
• "The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry."
   
• "Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship.  Humanity needs a lesson in humility."
   
• "The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice."
   
• "My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism."
   
• "Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'."
   
• "A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence."
   
• "I love romantic poetry."
   
• "Nothing is wrong with peace and love.  It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ's followers seem to disagree."
   
• "Natural selection is anything but random."
   
• "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."
   
• "Segregation has no place in the education system."
   
• "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."