Quotes from Richard Dawkins

When a company seeks a new chief executive officer, or a university a new vice-chancellor, enormous trouble is taken to find the best person.

All qualified physicists, biologists, cosmologists and geologists agree, on the basis of massive, mutually corroborating evidence, that the earth's age is at least four billion years.

All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

I can remember at the age of about six being fascinated by the planets and learning all about Mars and Venus and things.

The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.

The usefulness of science is sometimes exaggerated. You'd never talk about music being useful or art being useful.

Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.

I sympathize with politicians who have to watch every syllable they utter for fear it will be misused by somebody with an agenda.

I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there's a scientific lesson, for example - when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That's actually very valuable.

I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true.

I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.

Far from being demeaning to human spiritual values, scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit.

It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that if Darwinism was really a theory of chance, it could not work.

I have a strong feeling that the subject of evolution is beautiful without the excuse of creationists needing to be bashed.

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will.

I shall not make an argument ad hominem. My argument is ad bullshitem.

Offense is what people take when they can't take argument.

Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle.

An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version.

I did not end up as broadly educated as my Cambridge colleagues, but I graduated probably better equipped to write a book on my chosen subject.

I was confirmed at my prep school at the age of 13.

I would like people to appreciate science in the same way they appreciate the arts.