Richard Dawkins Quotes & Sayings

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

“It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself.”

“My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans.”

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

“Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”

“You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.”

“Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.”

“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.”

“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”

“There are quite a lot of YouTube clips of me that have gone viral. One that I think of is of a young woman at a lecture I was giving - she came from Liberty University, which is a ludicrous religious institution. She said, 'What if you are wrong?' and I answered that rather briefly, and that's gone viral.”