Quotes from Richard Dawkins

Being an atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily, and fully.

If I say that I am more interested in preventing the slaughter of large whales than I am in improving housing conditions for people, I am likely to shock some of my friends.

The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling - though not to me.

The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it - language, art, science - seemed to have evolved only once. The eye, by contrast, independently evolved 40 times. So, if you were to 'replay' evolution, the eye would almost certainly appear again, whereas the big brain probably wouldn't.

We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.

Of course in science there are things that are open to doubt and things need to be discussed. But among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know.

In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science because it was for the good of the Communist Party.

What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them.

Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.

The Darwinian theory is in principle capable of explaining life. No other theory that has ever been suggested is in principle capable of explaining life.

I find many of answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist.

By dislaiming the idea of a next life, we can take more excitement in this one!

When I sign books, I get lines of people and what they usually say is: "Thank you. You have changed my life." I am really moved by that.

I have begun several projects which were never completed, not necessarily because they failed, but because I got interested in other things.

As a liberal, I would hesitate to propose a blanket ban on any style of dress because of the implications for individual liberty and freedom of choice.

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

I'm afraid the Internet is filled with people using really very intemperate language.

How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'?

I didn't know children were expected to have literary heroes, but I certainly had one, and I even identified with him at one time: Doctor Dolittle, whom I now half identify with the Charles Darwin of Beagle days.

Why are we so obsessed with monogamous fidelity?

My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans.

When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.

Christopher Hitchens was a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion far wider than anybody I know.

I live in a post-Christian world in Oxford; it is quite rare to meet somebody who is religious in academic life now, and there is absolutely no tendency for rioting and mayhem, and it is extremely civilised.