56 Richard Dawkins Quotes: Lessons for God, Religion & Evolution

Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist, author, evolutionary biologist, and specialist in animal behavior.

Richard is known for his ability to communicate concepts ranging from research to non-expert audiences. Thus he has been a key figure in increasing the understanding of the people towards science. He is also known for his ideas of removing religion from science education and public policy.

Here are some best Richard Dawkins Quotes that will help you to know about God, religion, atheism & evolution.

Richard Dawkins Quotes About God

1. “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” ― Richard Dawkins

2. “I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.” ― Richard Dawkins

3. “A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence.” ― Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins Quotes About Religion

4. “Religion is a distraction from true education.” ― Richard Dawkins

5. “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” ― Richard Dawkins

6. “When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.” ― Richard Dawkins

7. “Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything.” ― Richard Dawkins

8. “I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” ― Richard Dawkins

9. “A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a ‘child of Muslim parents’ will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.” ― Richard Dawkins

10. “Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.” ― Richard Dawkins

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

12. “Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought if people needed a crutch for consolation, where’s the harm? September 11th changed all that.” ― Richard Dawkins

13. “Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It’s a sort of crime against childhood.” ― Richard Dawkins

14. “My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders, and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a “they” as opposed to a “we” can be identified at all.” ― Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins Quotes about critical thinking for child

15. “Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.” ― Richard Dawkins

16. “Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether they are ‘valid,’ let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so.” ― Richard Dawkins

17. “The majority of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all.” ― Richard Dawkins

18. “Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.” ― Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins Quotes About Morality

19. “Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God’s approval and reward or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That’s not morality, that’s just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though.” ― Richard Dawkins

20. “If this dysfunctional family was the best Sodom had to offer by way of morals, some might begin to feel a certain sympathy with God and his judicial brimstone.” ― Richard Dawkins

21. “Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture, rightly observed.” ― Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins Quotes About Life

22. “Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.” ― Richard Dawkins

23. “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism because we are all born selfish.” ― Richard Dawkins

24. “The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.” ― Richard Dawkins

25. “Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.” ― Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins Inspirational Quotes

26. “You can make some inferences about a man’s character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.” ― Richard Dawkins

27. “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.” ― Richard Dawkins

28. “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.” ― Richard Dawkins

29. “The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear.” ― Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins Quotes on Evolution

30. “The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.” ― Richard Dawkins

31. “I am thrilled to be alive at the time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.” ― Richard Dawkins

32. “Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colors.” ― Richard Dawkins

33. “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.” ― Richard Dawkins

34. “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.” ― Richard Dawkins

35. “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.” ― Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins Quotes on Atheism

36. “If you’re an atheist, you know, you believe, this is the only life you’re going to get. It’s a precious life, It’s a beautiful life. It’s something we should live to the full, to the end of our days. Where if you’re religious and you believe in another life somehow, that means you don’t live this life to the full because you think you’re going to get another one. That’s an awfully negative way to live a life. Being an atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily and fully” ― Richard Dawkins

37. “Atheists don’t have to fear a great spy camera in the sky. They only – so the argument goes – have to fear real cameras and real policemen. Maybe you’ve heard the cynical witticism ‘Conscience is knowing that someone is watching.” ― Richard Dawkins

38. “We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” ― Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins God Delusion Quotes

39. “Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.” ― Richard Dawkins

40. “Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether they are ‘valid,’ let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so.” ― Richard Dawkins

41. “A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!” ― Richard Dawkins

42. “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.” ― Richard Dawkins

43. “When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.” ― Richard Dawkins

44. “I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.” ― Richard Dawkins

45. “It is all too easy to mistake passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will.” ― Richard Dawkins

46. “If you don’t understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it.” ― Richard Dawkins

47. “Many religious people find it hard to imagine how, without religion, one can be good, or would even want to be good.” ― Richard Dawkins

48. “Children should be taught not so much what to think as to how to think.” ― Richard Dawkins

49. “Atheist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation.” ― Richard Dawkins

50. “Goodness is no part of the definition of the God Hypothesis, merely a desirable add-on.” ― Richard Dawkins

51. “If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.” ― Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins Biology Quotes

52. “We’re going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.” ― Richard Dawkins

53. “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.” ― Richard Dawkins

54. “Gravity is not a version of the truth. It is the truth. Anyone who doubts it is invited to jump out a tenth-story window.” ― Richard Dawkins

55. “We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmer to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth that still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it.” ― Richard Dawkins

56. “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.” ― Richard Dawkins

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