Quotes from Richard Dawkins

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point

It is all too easy to mistake passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will.

In George Bernard Shaw's words, 'The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection. . . . Natural selection . . . is a non-random force, pushing towards improvement. . . . Every generation has its Darwinian failures but every individual is descended only from previous generations' successful minorities. . . . [T]here can be no going downhill - species can't get worse as a prelude to getting better. . . . There may be more than one peak.

Religion is a distraction from true education.

You can't get away with saying, 'If you try to stop me from insulting homosexuals it violates my freedom of prejudice.' But you can get away with saying, 'It violates my freedom of religion.' What, when you think about it, is the difference? Yet again, religion trumps all.

Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped living things to thrive on the stuff and, indeed, suffocate without it.

We should always be open-minded, but the only good reason to believe that something exists is if there is real evidence that it does.

Despite the Great Chain of Being's traditional ranking of humans between animals and angels, there is no evolutionary justification for the common assumption that evolution is somehow 'aimed' at humans, or that humans are 'evolution's last word'.

Relatives share a substantial proportion of their genes. Each selfish gene therefore has its loyalties divided between different bodies.

The idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe.

Can omniscient God, who Knows the future, find The omnipotence to Change His future mind?

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.

We're going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.

Science doesn't have all the answers, but it is good at spotting the important questions when they are camouflaged against a background of common sense.

If the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we should none of us be here.

I prefer to say that I believe in people, and people, when given the right encouragement to think for themselves about all the information now available, very often turn out not to believe in God and to lead fulfilled and satisfied—indeed, liberated—lives.

To say that something happened supernaturally is not just to say 'We don't understand it' but to say 'We will never understand it, so don't even try.

I don't care about what is good and what is evil, I care about what is true.

Natural selection is a beguiling counterfeiter of deliberate purpose.

Bad things happen because things happen.

As J. B. S. Haldane said when asked what evidence might contradict evolution, 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.