Latest Richard Dawkins Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science, because it was for the good of the Communist Party.

  Richard Dawkins

  Party, People, Communist

  Source: www.newstatesman.com

• If you are asking me if my more global purpose is a battle against religion, it is.

  Richard Dawkins

  Battle, Purpose, Asking

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Charles Darwin made arguably the greatest discovery any human has ever made. He was a man of great persistence. He wasn't probably a natural genius, he worked very hard - even though he was an invalid. He was a great family man, a very nice man. I think he was admirable in all sorts of ways.

  Richard Dawkins

  Nice, Men, Thinking

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• You are born into a dangerous world, there are all sorts of ways in which you could die, and you need to believe your parents when they tell you don't go near the edge of the cliff, or don't pick up that snake, etc. There could very well be a Darwinian survival value in that sort of brain rule of thumb. And a by-product of that could be that you believe your parents when they tell you about the juju in the sky, or whatever it might be.

  Richard Dawkins

  Believe, Sky, Snakes

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• In Britain you don't usually learn about evolution until you are about 15. I should have thought that you should start at about 8. But I could be wrong about that.

  Richard Dawkins

  Should Have, Evolution, Should

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• I think there could be a very large number who are creationists by default. Those are the people I want to reach.

  Richard Dawkins

  Thinking, Numbers, People

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• The beauty of evolution is that it does provide an explanation of how you can get complexity out of simplicity. It does it by slow, gradual degree. At no point are you postulating the sudden coming into existence of a complicated being.

  Richard Dawkins

  Simplicity, Degrees, Doe

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• The recurrent laryngeal nerve - which runs from the head to the voice box - goes all the way down into the chest, loops around a major artery, then goes all the way back up again. It goes right past the larynx on the way down. All a decent designer would have to do is loop it off at that point. What we're looking at is the legacy of history.

  Richard Dawkins

  Running, Past, Voice

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Very close cousins like humans and chimps have almost all their genes in common. Slightly less close cousins like humans and monkeys still have recognizably the same genes. You could carry on right on down to humans and bacteria, and you will find continuous compelling evidence for the hierarchical tree of cousinship.

  Richard Dawkins

  Cousin, Tree, Monkeys

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• People will say, "You're never going to convince me that something as complicated as an eye could come about by sheer chance." And the answer is that natural selection is the very opposite of sheer chance. Natural selection is a non-random process.

  Richard Dawkins

  Eye, Opposites, People

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• We have the same genetic code for all living creatures. We have a large number of genes that are manifestly the same, but with detail differences - they look like different drafts of the same book. In extreme cases, like a human and a beetroot, it's like the difference between Matthew and Luke's Gospel - clearly they tell the same story, but with different words. Whereas with a human and a chimp, it's like two different printings of Matthew, with a few typos in one.

  Richard Dawkins

  Book, Two, Differences

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Islamic myths are mostly actually plagiarized from the Christian ones, both biblically and in terms of modern creationism. If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.

  Richard Dawkins

  Christian, Islamic, Literature

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• There is a tendency for people to say evolution is only a theory. That is inappropriate.

  Richard Dawkins

  People, Evolution, Inappropriate

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• I read in the paper today the list of the most popular boys' names in Britain. The first was Jack, the second was Mohammed. That makes me feel a little bit worried.

  Richard Dawkins

  Boys, Names, Firsts

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Creationists are possibly gaining more political power. In the U.S., you are constantly hearing stories of school boards harassing teachers and trying to get textbooks banned.

  Richard Dawkins

  Teacher, School, Political

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Creationists and Holocaust deniers are both very similar - both are denying what is a perfectly manifest fact. In the case of Holocaust deniers it's more recent history, but in both cases the evidence - in favour of the Holocaust and evolution - is simply overwhelming. That doesn't mean they are morally or politically equivalent. But they are equivalent in denying history.

  Richard Dawkins

  Mean, Holocaust, Facts

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Evolution is a very, very important idea. It is the explanation for all of life - a stunningly simple, yet powerful explanation. If you think about it, before Darwin, we hadn't the foggiest idea of how we came into being. Now we do. It's still such an exciting idea that it is well worth everybody understanding it.

  Richard Dawkins

  Powerful, Simple, Thinking

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• The other way is the multiverse way. That says that maybe the universe we are in is one of a very large number of universes. The vast majority will not contain life because they have the wrong gravitational constant or the wrong this constant or that constant. But as the number of universes climbs, the odds mount that a tiny minority of universes will have the right fine-tuning.

  Richard Dawkins

  Numbers, Odds, Tuning

  Source: inters.org

• Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all independently just happening to fit the bill.

  Richard Dawkins

  Circles, Odds, Bills

  Source: inters.org

• People who believe in God conclude there must have been a divine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants to get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable.

  Richard Dawkins

  Believe, People, Half

  Source: inters.org

• If God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slightly odd that he should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings capable of worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in.

  Richard Dawkins

  Religious, Years, People

  Source: inters.org

• Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years, you get these monsters of improbability, like the human brain and the rain forest. It should warn us against ever again assuming that because something is complicated, God must have done it.

  Richard Dawkins

  Rain, Years, Done

  Source: inters.org

• For centuries the most powerful argument for God's existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But [Charles] Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection.

  Richard Dawkins

  Beautiful, Powerful, Intelligent

  Source: inters.org

• Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science.

  Richard Dawkins

  Miracle, Facts, Spirit

  Source: inters.org

• I think that [Jay] Gould's separate compartments was a purely political ploy to win middle-of-the-road religious people to the science camp. But it's a very empty idea. There are plenty of places where religion does not keep off the scientific turf.

  Richard Dawkins

  Religious, Thinking, Winning

  Source: inters.org