Richard Dawkins

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

“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.”

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

“It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.”

“In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science because it was for the good of the Communist Party.”

“Segregation has no place in the education system.”

“Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped living things to thrive on the stuff and, indeed, suffocate without it.”

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

“The earliest books in the New Testament to be written were the Epistles, not the Gospels. It's almost as though Saint Paul and others who wrote the Epistles weren't that interested in whether Jesus was real.”

“[W]e may now be on the threshold of a new kind of genetic takeover. DNA replicators built 'survival machines' for themselves — the bodies of living organisms including ourselves. As part of their equipment, bodies evolved onboard computers — brains. Brains evolved the capacity to communicate with other brains by means of language and cultural traditions. But the new milieu of cultural tradition opens up new possibilities for self-replicating entities. The new replicators are not DNA and they are not 158 The Blind Watchmaker clay crystals. They are patterns of information that can thrive only in brains or the artificially manufactured products of brains — books, computers, and so on. But, given that brains, books and computers exist, these new replicators, which I called memes to distinguish them from genes, can propagate themselves from brain to brain, from brain to book, from book to brain, from brain to computer, from computer to computer.”

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

“Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.”

“When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.”

“My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.”

“I wouldn't want to have the thought police going to people's homes, dictating what they teach their children. I don't want to be Big Brotherish. I would hate that.”

“What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them.”

“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.”

“If you were to actually travel around schools and universities and listen in on lectures about evolution, you might find a fairly substantial fraction of young people, without knowing what it is they disapprove of, think they disapprove of it, because they've been brought up to.”

“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.”

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