Quotes About Richard Dawkins

I call myself an agnostic. I'm open to change. I'm the same sort of person, although much less aggressive, as Richard Dawkins.

The state of Israel seems to owe its very existence to the American Jewish vote, while at the same time consigning the non-religious to political oblivion.

I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist.

Sam Harris, the late Christopher Hitchens, and the contemporary British philosopher Richard Dawkins composed what one wag calls the Holy Trinity of the New Atheism.

I'm an atheist, but I'm very relaxed about it. I don't preach my atheism, but I have a huge amount of respect for people like Richard Dawkins who do.

My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.

Christopher Hitchens was a great warrior, a magnificent orator, a pugilist and a gentleman. He was kind, but he took no prisoners when arguing with idiots.

One of Dawkins' major gripes is against religion. I am in total agreement on that one. I abhor religion.

Nico Tinbergen was my doctoral supervisor, and he was a benign, avuncular sort of influence; everybody loved him.

We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics.

If all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism, I would be the first to admit it, and I would immediately change my mind. As things stand, however, all available evidence (and there is a vast amount of it) favours evolution.

Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality that would not imply that the theory of evolution was false.

Why would anybody be intimidated by mere words? I mean, neither I nor any other athiest that I know ever threatens violence. We never threaten to fly planes into skyscrapers. We never threaten suicide bombs. We are very gentle people. All we do is use words to talk about things like the cosmos, the origin of the universe, evolution, the origin of life. What's there to be frightened of? It's just an opinion.

Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.

You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.

The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something.

The Bishop goes on to the human eye, asking rhetorically, and with the implication that there is no answer, 'How could an organ so complex evolve?' This is not an argument, it is simply an affirmation of incredulity.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

The resemblance of the signs of the zodiac to the animals after which they are named... is as unimpressive as the predictions of astrologers.

Alister McGrath has now written two books with my name in the title. The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, 'was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

Evolution is not a genetically controlled distortion of one adult form into another; it is a genetically controlled alteration in a developmental program.

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact...That didn't have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn't. It didn't have to be true, but it is....Evolution is the only game in town, the greatest show on earth.

There is no reason to regard God as immune from consideration along the spectrum of probabilities. And there is certainly no reason to suppose that, just because God can be neither proved nor disproved, his probability of existence is 50 per cent.