Richard Dawkins Men Quotations

Evolution normally does not come to a halt, but constantly 'tracks' the changing environment.

False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment.

Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next.

Our subjective judgment of what seems like a good bet is irrelevant to what is actually a good bet.

I shall not make an argument ad hominem. My argument is ad bullshitem.

The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.

Offense is what people take when they can't take argument.

The popularity of the paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement. I think that the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same appetite which drives the best of true science, and it is an appetite which true science is best qualified to satisfy.

I've been reading an Alabama newspaper that one man shot another man because he beat him in a Bible-quoting competition.

When we talk about genes for anything, like a gene for being gay or a gene for being aggressive or something of that sort, that a gene for anything may not have been a gene for that thing under different environmental conditions.

God is an idea that people believe in and I spend time arguing with people that subscribe to that idea(man made idea).

How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair defends them on grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a school whose head of science believes the world is less than 10,000 years old.

I think what I'd really like to see would be a mass consciousness-raising movement so that we would all become vegetarian.

You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.

The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.

As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect.

Do you advocate the Ten Commandments as a guide to the good life? Then I can only presume that you don't know the Ten Commandments.

A formative influence on my undergraduate self was the response of a respected elder statesmen of the Oxford Zoology Department when an American visitor had just publicly disproved his favourite theory. The old man strode to the front of the lecture hall, shook the American warmly by the hand and declared in ringing, emotional tones: 'My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.' And we clapped our hands red. Can you imagine a Government Minister being cheered in the House of Commons for a similar admission? "Resign, Resign" is a much more likely response!

The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist.

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.

[Richard Leakey is] a robust hero of a man, who actually lives up to the cliché, “a big man in every sense of the word.” Like other big men he is loved by many, feared by some, and not over-preoccupied with the judgments of any.

I think we have got to start again and go right back to first principles. The argument I shall advance, surprising as it may seem coming from the author of the earlier chapters, is that, for an understanding of the evolution of modern man, we must begin by throwing out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas on evolution. If there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports? ... Is he manuvering to maximize David Attenborough's television ratings?

There is something so mysterious that it is almost like God. God is in the equations. God is in the fundamental constants. And that's fine. I mean, that's just redefinition of that which we find mysterious at the basis of the universe.

Religion has been a powerful weapon in the hands of governments, in the hands of priests, in the hands of kings who have used it as a weapon to keep down the populace. It is a wonderful way of disciplining people and making them do what you want, to tell them that if they don't do what you want they will, for example, go to Hell.

By dislaiming the idea of a next life, we can take more excitement in this one!

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