Richard Dawkins

“Evolution never looks to the future.”

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

“When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.”

“Segregation has no place in the education system.”

“One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.”

“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.”

“Science coverage could be improved by the recognition that science is timeless, and therefore science stories should not need to be pegged to an item in the news.”

“For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.”

“We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.”

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

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

“Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.”

“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

“But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.”

“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.”

“If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, authority, revelation or faith, they will automatically work out for themselves that they are atheists.”

“At least the fundamentalists haven't tried to dilute their message. Their faith is exposed for what it is for all to see.”

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

“A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics, a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.”

“The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.”

“God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.”

“I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.”

“Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.”

“Nothing is wrong with peace and love. It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ's followers seem to disagree.”