Quotes from Richard Dawkins

We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so.

Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.

Evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion.

Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It's a sort of crime against childhood.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

THE MAJORITY of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all

I am not advocating a morality based on evolution.

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.

All religious beliefs seem weird to people not brought up in them.

Having a debate with a modern Christian is like punching a sponge.

You cannot be both sane and well educated and disbelieve in evolution. The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person has got to believe in evolution.

It is a remarkable coincidence that almost everyone has the same religion as their parents and it always just so happens they're the right religion.

Matthew and Luke handle the problem differently, by deciding that Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem after all. But they get him there by different routes.

Two religions cannot both be right, because they contradict each other, yet they can both be wrong.

No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth.

Religion is the most inflammatory enemy-labelling device in history.

I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody is too polite - or too devout - to notice: religion, and specifically the devaluing effect that religion has on human life.

...it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions.

To describe religions as mind viruses is sometimes interpreted as contemptuous or even hostile. It is both. I am often asked why I am so hostile to organized religion.

Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant.

We have this one life, let's enjoy it, let's live it to the full and don't get so worked up about don't identify yourself so passionately with this business called religion.

I great difficulty having any respect for a religion that has so little confidence in the truth of its beliefs that it feels reduced to using threats in order to propagate those beliefs.

Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything.