Quotes from Richard Dawkins

A branch of one of the cranial nerves, the recurrent laryngeal runs from the brain to the larynx. It doesn't go straight there, however. Instead, it dives down into the chest, loops around one of the main arteries leaving the heart, and proceeds back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe the detour is significant (British understatement) and it is presumably costly. The explanation lies in history, in the nerve's emergence in our fish ancestors before a discernible neck evolved.

This intrepid warrior for truth, this cultured, courteous citizen of the world, this devastating, coruscating enemy of lies and cant – well, maybe he has no immortal soul – none of us has.

Have lucky stars swum into Uranus?

Personally I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world championship. Humanitiy needs a lesson in humility.

Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators

All life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

There are so many different faiths. How do you know the holy book you have been brought up with is the true one? And if all the others are wrong, what makes you think your holy book isn't wrong too?

45 per cent of the population of the United States firmly believes, to the contrary, an elementary falsehood: that all species separately owe their existence to 'intelligent design' less than ten thousand years ago.

Whatever the philosophical problems raised by consciousness, for the purpose of this story it can be thought of as the culmination of an evolutionary trend towards the emancipation of survival machines as executive decision-takers from their ultimate masters, the genes. [The Selfish Gene]

You may grind their souls in the self-same mill, You may bind them, heart and brow; But the poet will follow the rainbow still, And his brother will follow the plow. JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY (1844–90) 'The Rainbow's Treasure

A brain that is good at simulating models in imagination is also, almost inevitably, in danger of self-delusion.

Problems arise when (especially) theologians use such metaphorical language without realizing that that is what they are doing, and without even realizing that there is a distinction between metaphor and reality – saying something like: 'It is not important whether Jesus really fed the five thousand. What matters is what the idea of the story means to us.' Actually it is important, because millions of devout people do believe the Bible is literally true.

There are more cells in your brain than there are brains in your entire body.

Humans have always wondered about the meaning of life... life has no higher purpose than to perpetuate the survival of DNA... life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

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.

In the vastness of astronomical space and geological time that which seems impossible in the middle world might turn out to be inevitable.

Some of life must be devoted to living itself; some of life must be devoted to doing something worthwhile with one's life, not just to perpetuating it.

Az értelmes élet egy bolygón akkor éri el a nagykorúságot, amikor elsÅ' ízben dolgozza ki saját létének indoklását.

There is real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.

Discretion can be abused, and rulebooks are important safeguards against that. But the balance has shifted too far in the direction of an obsessive reverence for rules.

A consciência de que temos apenas uma vida deveria torná-la ainda mais preciosa. A visão ateísta reafirma e melhora a vida, e ao mesmo tempo nunca é afetada pela auto-ilusão, pelo excesso de otimismo ou pela autopiedade chorosa daqueles que acham que a vida lhes deve alguma coisa.

In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our ... nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists, and quacks. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive skepticism of adult science.

As Mark Twain cuttingly remarked, if you removed all occurrences of the phrase 'And it came to pass', the Book of Mormon would be reduced to a pamphlet.

Could it have been the drawing of maps that boosted our ancestors beyond the critical threshold which the other apes just failed to cross?