Quotes from Richard Dawkins

The Bible may be an arresting andpoetic work of fiction, but it is not the sort of book you should giveyour children to form their morals.

Either blasphemy is a victimless crime or its victim is powerful enough to take care of himself without any help from you.

To an honest judge, the alleged marriage between religion and science is a shallow, empty, spin-doctored sham.

With respect to those meanings of 'human' that are relevant to the morality of abortion, any fetus is less human than an adult pig.

I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous ideas.

There is an attitude in the culture that says that everybody is entitled to their opinion. You got to respect their opinion. No, you damn well haven't got to respect their opinion.

I am utterly fed up with the respect we have been brainwashed into bestowing upon religion.

I might respect you as a brilliant intellect, runner, musician or juggler. But respect your BELIEFS? Only if they're supported by evidence.

Tortoises can survive for weeks without food or water, easily long enough to float in the Humboldt Current from South America to the Galapagos Islands.

If you think about it, 534 members of the U.S. Congress cannot all be religious. That's just statistical nonsense. Many of them are quite well-educated.

Notoriously, the United States is the most religious of the Western advanced nations. It's a bit mysterious why that is.

I think my love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western countries is betraying itself where Islam is concerned.

I don't feel depressed. I feel elated.

I don't think that it's up to government to dictate what people should wear.

If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible.

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium.

The feminists taught us about consciousness-raising.

Teachers who help to open young minds perform a duty which is as near sacred as I will admit.

One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.

I think there is a sort of box-ticking mentality. Not just in the teaching profession. You hear about it in medicine and nursing. It's a lawyer-driven insistence on meeting prescribed standards rather than just being a good doctor.

Any teaching of falsehoods in science classes should certainly be identified and stopped by school inspectors. School inspectors should be looking at science teachings to make sure they are evidence-based science.

Science is the poetry of reality.

It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.