Quotes from Richard Dawkins

I'm fascinated by the idea that genetics is digital. A gene is a long sequence of coded letters, like computer information. Modern biology is becoming very much a branch of information technology.

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories.

We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance.

I detest 'Jingle Bells,' 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,' and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.

Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it.

My computer is a very complex gadget and it was designed by many designers, so why must the universe have only a single designer and not many designers?

If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.

Writing a computer virus program is child's play. Any fool can do it, which is why the silly little twerps who do have nothing to be proud of.

Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?

When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.

There are people who try to get atheists to form a sort of atheist church and have atheist community singsongs and things. I don't see the need for that, but if people want to do it, why shouldn't they?

A constellation is not an entity at all, not the kind of thing that Uranus, or anything else, can sensibly be said to 'move into.'

What is illiberal is not persuasion but imposition of one's views.

I suppose I'm a cultural Anglican, and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green. I have a certain love for it.

The obvious objections to the execution of Saddam Hussein are valid and well aired. His death will provoke violent strife between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and between Iraqis in general and the American occupation forces.

Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it.

If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there's something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.

In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of 'The Selfish Gene,' I did actually use the metaphor of a 'virus.' So when anybody talks about something going viral on the Internet, that is exactly what a meme is, and it looks as though the word has been appropriated for a subset of that.

The illusion of design is so successful that to this day most Americans (including, significantly, many influential and rich Americans) stubbornly refuse to believe it is an illusion.

The feature of living matter that most demands explanation is that it is almost unimaginably complicated in directions that convey a powerful illusion of deliberate design.

Sometimes I think it's possible to mistake desire for clarity and talking in a no-nonsense way for aggression.

Evolution never looks to the future.

Faith is belief without evidence and reason; coincidentally that's also the definition of delusion.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.