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. Richard Dawkins Car
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. Richard Dawkins Christmas
Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing - a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe. Richard Dawkins Courage
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. Richard Dawkins Courage
Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility. Richard Dawkins Computers
Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs. Richard Dawkins Chance
The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun. Richard Dawkins Chance
Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say in public life. It is about saying that religion alone should not confer a privileged say in public life, or greater influence on it. It really is as simple as that. Richard Dawkins Alone
The reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal world and moles live in an underground world and water striders live in a surface tension-dominated flatland, we live in a social world. Richard Dawkins Computers
I do sometimes accuse people of ignorance, but that is not intended to be an insult. I'm ignorant of lots of things. Ignorance is something that can be remedied by education. Richard Dawkins Education
I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine. Richard Dawkins Imagination
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. Richard Dawkins Faith
Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it? Richard Dawkins Sad
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. Richard Dawkins Respect
Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness. Richard Dawkins Faith
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry. Richard Dawkins Faith
To an honest judge, the alleged marriage between religion and science is a shallow, empty, spin-doctored sham. Richard Dawkins Marriage
All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation. Richard Dawkins Beauty
Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium. Richard Dawkins Sports
We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space. Richard Dawkins Space