Quotes from Richard Dawkins

Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.

There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism .

Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated social evolution.

It has become almost a cliche 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.

Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it.

Just as I wouldn't expect a gynecologist to have a debate with somebody who believes in the Stork-theory of reproduction, I won't do debates with Young Earth creationists.

At least the fundamentalists haven't tried to dilute their message. Their faith is exposed for what it is for all to see.

I've never been the sort of firebrand that I've been made out to be. I'm actually quite a mild person.

I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research.

The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.

I think there could be a very large number who are creationists by default. Those are the people I want to reach.

I think it's misleading to use a word like 'God' in the way Einstein did. I'm sorry that Einstein did. I think he was asking for trouble, and he certainly was misunderstood.

I get the feeling more and more that religion is being left behind.

My decision to be a scientist was a bit of a drift really, more or less by default.

There are risks in the sheer brevity of Twitter, and it's actually quite an elegant art reducing what you have to say to 140 characters, and it's something that I quite enjoy attempting to do.

I don't do formal debates, because formal debates where you have two people up on a stage in equal status, and each of them is given 20 minutes to give their point of view, and then 10 minutes for a rebuttal, or whatever, that creates the illusion that you really do have here two equal points of view of equal scientific standing.

People really, really hate their religion being criticized. It's as though you've said they had an ugly face; they seem to identify personally with it.

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

The central dogma of the New Testament is that Jesus died as a scapegoat for the sin of Adam and the sins that all we unborn generations might have been contemplating in the future. Adam's sin is perhaps mitigated by the extenuating circumstance that he didn't exist.

Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.

Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say in public life. It is about saying that religion alone should not confer a privileged say in public life, or greater influence on it. It really is as simple as that.

A universe with a creator would be a totally different kind of universe, scientifically speaking, than one without.

If circumcision has any justification AT ALL, it should be medical only. Parents' religion is the worst of all reasons - pure child abuse.

I would like to find a way in which people in Saudi Arabia could learn that they can be something other than a Muslim. Some people may not realize this. Of course, there is the problem that you can get in trouble or get stoned.