Richard Dawkins

“Compassionate doctors sometimes lie to patients about the severity of their condition, and it is not always wrong to do so.”

“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 mac...”

“I'm pretty sure there is some genetic component towards intelligence.”

“I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.”

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

“If there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection.”

“There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists.”

“The universe doesn't owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn't owe us a nice warm feeling inside.”

“If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle.”

“The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it - language, art, science - seemed to have evolved only once. The eye, by contrast, independently evolved 40 times...”

“Every night of our lives, we dream, and our brain concocts visions which are, at least until we wake up, highly convincing. Most of us have had experiences which are verging on hallucination...”

“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.”

“There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that m...”

“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.”

“Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle.”

“Don't feel embarrassed if you've never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name, either.”

“Just as I wouldn't expect a gynecologist to have a debate with somebody who believes in the Stork-theory of reproduction, I won't do debates with Young Earth creationists.”

“There are many very educated people who are religious, but they're not creationists.”

“If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.”

“We have the power to turn against our creators.”