"We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
— Richard Dawkins

"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."
— Richard Dawkins

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
— Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)

"Science is interesting, and if you don't agree you can fuck off.

Note: Dawkins was quoting a former editor of New Scientist Magazine, who is as yet unidentified (possibly Jeremy Webb?)"
— Richard Dawkins

"There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it."
— Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)

"Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time."
— Richard Dawkins

"Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one."
— Richard Dawkins

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

-this quote is actually found in Carl Sagan's book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, where he attributes it to engineer James Oberg, who says he stole it from someone else."
— Richard Dawkins

"Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether they are ‘valid,’ let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so."
— Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)

"...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong."
— Richard Dawkins

"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence."
— Richard Dawkins

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."
— Richard Dawkins

"Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional "next world" is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them. "
— Richard Dawkins

"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference."
— Richard Dawkins

"One of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding."
— Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)

"There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents."
— Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)

"Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that."
— Richard Dawkins

"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."
— Richard Dawkins (River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life)

"American political opportunities are loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest."
— Richard Dawkins

"THE MAJORITY of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all"
— Richard Dawkins

"The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver."
— Richard Dawkins

" After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings."
— Richard Dawkins

"I am thrilled to be alive at time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits."
— Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)

"Yahweh: "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unplesant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.""
— Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)

"The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear."
— Richard Dawkins

"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

"The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics."
— Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)

"The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry."
— Richard Dawkins

"You could give Aristotle a tutorial and you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect, yet not only can you know more than him about the world, you also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues."
— Richard Dawkins

"The Bishop goes on to the human eye, asking rhetorically, and with the implication that there is no answer, 'How could an organ so complex evolve?' This is not an argument, it is simply an affirmation of incredulity."
— Richard Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker)

"To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries"
— Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)

"We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes."
— Richard Dawkins

"The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg."
— Richard Dawkins

"The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion gives strong sanction to both- and mixes explosively with both. Only the willfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today. Without a doubt it is the prime aggravator of the Middle East. Those of us who have for years politely concealed our contempt for the dangerous collective delusion of religion need to stand up and speak out. Things are different now. All is changed, changed utterly."
— Richard Dawkins

"The resemblance of the signs of the zodiac to the animals after which they are named... is as unimpressive as the predictions of astrologers."
— Richard Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker)

"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. "
— Richard Dawkins

"You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being ... Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues."
— Richard Dawkins

"The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale. "
— Richard Dawkins

"The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity. "
— Richard Dawkins

"Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours."
— Richard Dawkins (The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution)

"Alister McGrath has now written two books with my name in the title. The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, 'was there ever dog that praised his fleas?'"
— Richard Dawkins

"Even those who do not, or cannot, avail themselves of a scientific education, choose to benefit from the technology that is made possible by the scientific education of others"
— Richard Dawkins

"It is often said, mainly by the 'no-contests', that although there is no positive evidence for the existence of God, nor is there evidence against his existence. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?"
— Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)

"My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a "they" as opposed to a "we" can be identified at all.
"
— Richard Dawkins (A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love)

"There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?"
— Richard Dawkins

"After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked -- as I am surprisingly often -- why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, 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 a part of it?"
— Richard Dawkins

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara."
— Richard Dawkins

"Everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god - from Ra to Shiva - in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in."
— Richard Dawkins

"O gato de Schröndinger é preso numa caixa com um mecanismo de morte acionado por um evento de mecânica quântica. Antes de abrirmos a tampa da caixa, não sabemos se o gato está vivo ou morto. O bom senso diz que, de qualquer jeito , o gato tem de estar ou vivo ou morto dentro da caixa. A interpretação de Copenhague contradiz o bom senso: tudo que existe antes de abrirmos a caixa é uma probabilidade. Assim que abrimos a caixa, a função de onda colapsa e ficamos com um evento isolado: o gato está morto ou o gato está vivo. Até que abramos a caixa, ele não estava nem morto nem vivo."
— Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)

"I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene."
— Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition)