1,184 Quotes by Richard Dawkins

The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling – though not to me.

It doesn't hurt my feelings when I get vilified by fundamentalist. I've actually made comedy out of it. I've made light of that.

The selfish gene. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence... they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version

Brains function on a need-to-know basis, and the need-to-know in order to survive on the African plains as hunter-gatherers. It's pure bonus if we manage to understand a bit about relativity and quantum theory as well. I think it's a tremendous privilege that we can understand as much as we can.