1,184 Quotes by Richard Dawkins

Just because science can’t in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn’t mean that religion can. It’s a simple and logical fallacy to say, ‘If science can’t do something therefore religion can.’

An ESS is stable, not because it is particularly good for the individuals participating in it, but simply because it is immune to treachery from within.

Evolution has been observed. It’s just that it hasn’t been observed while it’s happening.

The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no mystery about this. It had to happen by definition.

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.

For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.

All the fossils that we have ever found have always been found in the appropriate place in the time sequence. There are no fossils in the wrong place.

How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'?

I live in a post-Christian world in Oxford; it is quite rare to meet somebody who is religious in academic life now, and there is absolutely no tendency for rioting and mayhem, and it is extremely civilised.