Quotes from Richard Dawkins

My passion is for scientific truth. I don't much care about good and evil. ... I care about what's true.

The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.

Gravity is not a version of the truth. It is the truth. Anyone who doubts it is invited to jump out a tenth-storey window.

Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when.

If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have to look.

I am passionate about the truth. Passion is very different from fundamentalism.

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

To put it bluntly, American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.

It is a lamentable observation that because of the way our laws are skewed toward the plaintiff, London has become the libel capital of the world.

I love romantic poetry.

Discrimination is not liberal. Arguing against discrimination is not intolerance.

It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have.

If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.

Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose. Accounts of Jesus's resurrection and ascension are about as well-documented as Jack and the Beanstalk.

Anybody who has something sensible or worthwhile to say should be able to say it calmly and soberly, relying on the words themselves to convey his meaning, without resorting to yelling.

If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.

I don't give a damn for anybody's opinion, I only care about the facts. So I'm not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where factual matters are concerned.

Many people want to send their children to faith schools because they get good exam results, but they're not foolish enough to believe that it's because of faith that they get good exam results.

I think that people in the Bible Belt are far less monolithically religious than many people imagine. There are lots and lots of people who are free-thinking, secularists, or atheists in the so-called Bible Belt.

If you were to actually travel around schools and universities and listen in on lectures about evolution, you might find a fairly substantial fraction of young people, without knowing what it is they disapprove of, think they disapprove of it, because they've been brought up to.

Don't kid yourself that you're going to live again after you're dead; you're not. Make the most of the one life you've got. Live it to the full.

There are quite a lot of YouTube clips of me that have gone viral. One that I think of is of a young woman at a lecture I was giving - she came from Liberty University, which is a ludicrous religious institution. She said, 'What if you are wrong?' and I answered that rather briefly, and that's gone viral.

A triumph of consciousness-raising has been the homosexual hijacking of the word 'gay.'

Words are not trivial. They matter because they raise consciousness.