Richard Dawkins Quotes

Of course they don't function as gills, but five-week human embryos can be regarded as little pink fishes, with gills.

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.

We're too stupid to decide on EU (that includes me)

The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free licence to tell us what to do. Which religion, anyway? The one in which we happen to have been brought up? To which chapter, then, of which book of the Bible should we turn — for they are far from unanimous and some of them are odious by any reasonable standards. How many literalists have read enough of the Bible to know that the death penalty is prescribed for adultery, for gathering sticks on the sabbath and for cheeking your parents? If we reject Deuteronomy and Leviticus (as all enlightened moderns do), by what criteria do we then decide which of religion's moral values to accept? Or should we pick and choose among all the world's religions until we find one whose moral teaching suits us? If so, again we must ask, by what criterion do we choose? And if we have independent criteria for choosing among religious moralities, why not cut out the middle man and go straight for the moral choice without the religion?

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

"Fundamentalist religion is hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of countless thousands of innocent, well-meaning, eager young minds. Non-fundamentalist, "sensible" religion may not be doing that. But it is making the world safe for fundamentalism by teaching children, from their earliest years, that unquestioning faith is a virtue."

[...] one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding. (p. 152 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)

There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.

The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.

Given a hundred clones of Carl Sagan, we might have some hope for the next century.

Undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance.

Evolution sceptic: Professor Haldane, even given the billions of years that you say were available for evolution, I simply cannot believe it is possible to go from a single cell to a complicated human body, with its trillions of cells organized into bones and muscles and nerves, a heart that pumps without ceasing for decades, miles and miles of blood vessels and kidney tubules, and a brain capable of thinking and talking and feeling. JBS: But madam, you did it yourself. And it only took you nine months.

یک نمونه آن پرسش فلسفی قدیمی است که می‌گوید: آیا تو هم مثل من قرمز می‌بینی؟ شاید آنچه برای تو قرمز می‌نماید برای من سبز باشید یا اصلاً رنگی باشد که در خیال من هم نمی‌گنجد! فیلسوفان این پرسش را در زمره پرسش‌هایی می‌دانند که هرگز پاسخی ندارد.

You know you've won the argument when the only counter argument they can find is that you are white or male or old.

Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun, but the full implications of Darwin’s revolution have yet to be widely realized.