Quotes by Richard Dawkins

Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.

We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we cant disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.

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.

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.

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 theyve been brought up to.

Publishers like a good buzz, and negative responses sell books just as well as positive ones.

If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that theres something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.

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.

People believe the only alternative to randomness is intelligent design.

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 thats because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

Beauty arises out of human inspiration.

All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation.

When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldnt put too much emphasis on the word just. There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.

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

I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine.

I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. Thats very true.

Isnt 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?

Im fascinated by the idea that genetics is digital. A gene is a long sequence of coded letters, like computer information. Modern biology is becoming very much a branch of information technology.