Quotes from Richard Dawkins

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Marx

God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.

Anthropologically informed works, from Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough to Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained or Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust, fascinatingly document the bizarre phenomenology of superstition and ritual. Read such books and marvel at the richness of human gullibility. But that is not

delayed reciprocal altruism can evolve in species that are capable of recognizing and remembering each other as individuals

do not just declare things to be irreducibly complex; the chances are that you haven't looked carefully enough at the details, or thought carefully enough about them.

Selection favours those genes which succeed in the presence of other genes, which in turn succeed in the presence of them.

To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.

Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.

A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet the chimp feels and thinks and — according to recent experimental evidence — may even be capable of learning a form of human language.

Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility.

Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error.

Ambrose Bierce's witty definition of the verb 'to pray': 'to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy'.

But we exist now. We are caring, intelligent animals and can treasure our brief lives. Why is eternal better than temporal, or supernatural higher than natural? Doesn't rarity increase value? God is an idea, not a natural creature. Why should his image be more valuable than our own nature?

I have devoted a whole book (Unweaving the Rainbow) to ultimate meaning, to the poetry of science, and to rebutting, specifically and at length, the charge of nihilistic negativity, so I shall restrain myself here.

even with selfish genes at the helm, nice guys can finish first.

And, for speakers of Arabic and Indian languages, knowledge of the Qur'an or the Bhagavad Gita is presumably just as essential for full appreciation of their literary heritage.

A. N. Wilson in Jesus and Robin Lane Fox in The Unauthorized Version (among

Le fait qu'un croyant est plus heureux qu'un sceptique n'est pas plus pertinent que le fait qu'un homme ivre est plus heureux qu'un homme sobre ».

I should have been put down at birth.

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use, and that the mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world. Whether

obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity.

Bir yan?lg?dan bir kiÅŸi ac? çekiyorsa, buna delilik denir. Bir yan?lg?dan birçok insan ac? çektiÄŸinde ise buna Din denir.

To succumb to the God Temptation in either of those guises, biological or cosmological, is an act of intellectual capitulation.

dinin gerçekten de kötü etkilerinden biri, anlamadan tatmin olman?n bize bir erdem olduÄŸunu öÄŸretmesidir.