Quotes from Richard Dawkins

There are many very educated people who are religious, but they're not creationists.

It doesn't hurt my feeling when I get vilified by fundamentalist religious people. I've actually made comedy out of it. I've made light of that.

Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.

There's clearly a lot of Ludditism, and you see it in all the hysteria about every scientific story.

There is no refutation of Darwinian evolution in existence. If a refutation ever were to come about, it would come from a scientist, and not an idiot.

Although many of us fear death, I think there is something illogical about it.

Public sharing is an important part of science.

The world is well supplied with spiders whose male ancestors died after mating. The world is bereft of spiders whose would-be ancestors never mated in the first place.

People like to trace their ancestry.

Humans have a proven track record in taking over planes by the use of threats, which work because the legitimate pilots value their own lives and those of their passengers.

I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organised ignorance.

'What is the purpose of the universe?' is a silly question.

Selfish genes actually explain altruistic individuals, and to me that's crystal-clear.

Beauty arises out of human inspiration.

Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang, but interposing an outside intelligence does nothing to add to that knowledge, as we still know nothing about the creation of that intelligence.

I do sometimes accuse people of ignorance, but that is not intended to be an insult. I'm ignorant of lots of things. Ignorance is something that can be remedied by education.

I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when you're being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have to improvise, you can change sentences around, and they're not exactly right.

What's wrong with being elitist if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive?

All the fossils that we have ever found have always been found in the appropriate place in the time sequence. There are no fossils in the wrong place.

I once wrote that anybody who believes the world is only 6,000 years old is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

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

Myths are fun, as long as you don't confuse them with the truth.

When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong.