Quotes by Richard Dawkins

When we look at a solid lump of iron or rock, we are really looking at what is almost entirely empty space. It looks and feels solid and opaque because our sensory systems and brains find it convenient to treat it as solid and opaque. It is convenient for the brain to represent a rock as solid because we cant walk through it. Solid is our way of experiencing things that we cant walk through or fall throug, because of the electromagnetic forces between atoms. Opaque is the experience we have when light bounces off the surface of an object, and none of it goes through.

We wanted to be accepted by our fellows, especially the influential natural leaders among us; and the ethos of my peers was – until my last year at Oundle – anti-intellectual. You had to pretend to be working less hard than you actually were. Native ability was respected; hard work was not. It was the same on the sports field. Sportsmen were admired more than scholars in any case. But if you could achieve sporting brilliance without training, so much the better. Why is native ability more admired than hard graft? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened

Were going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.

Discretion can be abused, and rulebooks are important safeguards against that. But the balance has shifted too far in the direction of an obsessive reverence for rules.

The habit of questioning authority is one of the most valuable gifts that a book, or a teacher, can give a young would-be scientist.

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you cant prove that there arent any, so shouldnt we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

Im 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.

I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when youre being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have to improvise, you can change sentences around, and theyre not exactly right.

We are a unique ape. We have language. Other animals have systems of communication that fall far short of that. They dont have the same ability to communicate complicated conditionals and what-ifs and talk about things that are not present.

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.

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.

Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.

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.

I detest Jingle Bells, White Christmas, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.

I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - youre told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.

It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.

I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organised ignorance.

The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it - language, art, science - seemed to have evolved only once. The eye, by contrast, independently evolved 40 times. So, if you were to replay evolution, the eye would almost certainly appear again, whereas the big brain probably wouldnt.

How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair defends them on grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a school whose head of science believes the world is less than 10,000 years old.