Richard Dawkins

“All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation.”

“Of course you can use the products of science to do bad things, but you can use them to do good things, too.”

“A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a jet plane's exhaust. A great improvement on a simple ballistic shell, it still cannot discriminate part...”

“As a liberal, I would hesitate to propose a blanket ban on any style of dress because of the implications for individual liberty and freedom of choice.”

“Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it.”

“Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang, but interposing an outside intelligence does nothing to add to that knowledge, as we still know nothing about the cr...”

“It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have.”

“A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.”

“If your plane is being hijacked by an armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants to go on living, there is room for bargaining.”

“Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.”

“I have a strong feeling that the subject of evolution is beautiful without the excuse of creationists needing to be bashed.”

“I have begun several projects which were never completed, not necessarily because they failed, but because I got interested in other things.”

“I certainly would absolutely never do what some of my American colleagues do and object to religious symbols being used, putting crosses up in the public square and things like that. I don't...”

“I detest 'Jingle Bells,' 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,' and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of Octob...”

“In the World Wars, people were perfectly able to shoot other people just because they belonged to the wrong country, without ever asking what their opinions were. Faith too is like that.”

“Nico Tinbergen was my doctoral supervisor, and he was a benign, avuncular sort of influence; everybody loved him.”

“Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it's a time for reflection, a time for memory, a time for regret.”

“If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there's something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evid...”

“I think my love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western countries is betraying itself where Islam is concerned.”

“I think the world's always a better place if people are filled with understanding.”