Quotes from Richard Dawkins

The welfare state is perhaps the greatest altruistic system the animal kingdom has ever known. But any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it. Individual humans who have more children than they are capable of rearing are probably too ignorant in most cases to be accused of conscious malevolent exploitation. Powerful institutions and leaders who deliberately encourage them to do so seem to me less free from suspicion.

Notwithstanding his somewhat dodgy family values, Jesus' ethical teachings were—at least by comparison with the ethical disaster area that is the Old Testament—admirable; but there are other teachings in the New Testament that no good person should support. I refer especially to the central doctrine of Christianity: that of 'atonement' for 'original sin'. This

The computers in which memes live are human brains.

A male on the other hand can never get enough copulations with as many different females as possible: the word excess has no meaning for a male.

So far, so vindictive: par for the Old Testament course. New Testament theology adds a new injustice, topped off by a new sadomasochism whose viciousness even the Old Testament barely exceeds. It is, when you think about it, remarkable that a religion should adopt an instrument of torture and execution as its sacred symbol, often worn around the neck. Lenny

What kind of ethical philosophy is it that condemns every child, even before it is born, to inherit the sin of a remote ancestor? Augustine

if by "God" one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying . . . it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.

suspect that neither the Cambridge nor the Oxford astronomer really believed that theologians have any expertise that enables them to answer questions that are too deep for science.

It will be remembered that the 'central theorem' of the selfish organism claims that an animal's behaviour tends to maximize its own (inclusive) fitness. We saw that to talk of an individual behaving so as to maximize its inclusive fitness is equivalent to talking of the gene or genes 'for' that behaviour pattern maximizing their survival.

As many atheists have said better than me, the knowledge that we have only one life should make it all the more precious.

The life of any one physical DNA molecule is quite short—perhaps a matter of months, certainly not more than one lifetime. But a DNA molecule could theoretically live on in the form of copies of itself for a hundred million years.

They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

The sight of her child smiling, or the sound of her kitten purring, is rewarding to a mother, in the same sense as food in the stomach is rewarding to a rat in a maze. But once it becomes true that a sweet smile or a loud purr are rewarding, the child is in a position to use the smile or the purr in order to manipulate the parent, and gain more than its fair share of parental investment.

Religion can endanger the life of the pious individual, as well as the lives of others.

Deists differ from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of cosmic intelligence, rather than the pantheist's metaphoric or poetic synonym for the laws of the universe.

Returning to humanity's need for comfort, it is, of course, real, but isn't there something childish in the belief that the universe owes us comfort, as of right?

We have now also seen that, in precisely the same sense as it is ever possible to talk of a gene 'for' a behaviour pattern, it is possible to talk of a gene, in one organism, 'for' a behaviour pattern (or other phenotypic characteristic) in another organism.

Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.

Parsimony is always in the forefront of a scientist's mind when choosing between theories, but it isn't always obvious how to judge it.

Atheists need to raise their own consciousness of the anomaly: religious opinion is the one kind of parental opinion that—by almost universal consent—can be fastened upon children who are, in truth, too young to know what their opinion really is. There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.

Our genes may instruct us to be selfish, but we are not necessarily compelled to obey them all our lives. It may just be more difficult to learn altruism than it would be if we were genetically programmed to be altruistic. Among animals, man is uniquely dominated by culture, by influences learned and handed down.

when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal force, the truth does not necessarily lie midway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong. And that justifies passion on the other side.

light from different stars produces 'rainbows' that are different in very particular ways, and this can tell us a lot about the stars.

We are at home with objects ranging in size from a few kilometres (the view from a mountaintop) to about a tenth of a millimetre (the point of a pin). Outside this range even our imagination is handicapped, and we need the help of instruments and of mathematics—which, fortunately, we can learn to deploy.