Quotes from Richard Dawkins

I'm a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims.

Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: It gives them something to do.

Evil is a miscellaneous collection of nasty things that nasty people do.

The reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal world and moles live in an underground world and water striders live in a surface tension-dominated flatland, we live in a social world.

My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.

I think the world's always a better place if people are filled with understanding.

Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.

The interesting question would be whether there's a Darwinian process, a kind of selection process whereby some memes are more likely to spread than others, because people like them, because they're popular, because they're catchy or whatever it might be.

I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.

We are a unique ape. We have language. Other animals have systems of communication that fall far short of that. They don't have the same ability to communicate complicated conditionals and what-ifs and talk about things that are not present.

A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.

Something pretty mysterious had to give rise to the origin of the universe.

I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.

I didn't have a very starry school career, I was medium to above average, nothing special.

It's an important point to realize that the genetic programming of our lives is not fully deterministic. It is statistical - it is in any animal merely statistical - not deterministic.

We've all been brought up with the view that religion has some kind of special privileged status. You're not allowed to criticise it.

Religious organisations have an automatic tax-free charitable status.

I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition.

I'm not a good observer. I'm not proud of it.

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair defends them on grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a school whose head of science believes the world is less than 10,000 years old.

We are a very, very unusual species.

Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.

There's a mystical strain in every country, and eclipses are likely to bring that out.