Richard Dawkins Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. ...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.

2. Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it. The God Delusion

3. A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth! The God Delusion

4. After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.

5. Different sorts of survival machine appear very varied on the outside and in their internal organs. An octopus is nothing like a mouse, and both are quite different from an oak tree. Yet in their fundamental chemistry they are rather uniform, and, in particular, the replicators that they bear, the genes, are basically the same kind of molecule in all of us—from bacteria to elephants. We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator—molecules called DNA— but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the replicators have built a vast range of machines to exploit them. A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water; there is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats. DNA works in mysterious ways. The Selfish Gene

6. DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

7. Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

8. Even those who do not, or cannot, avail themselves of a scientific education, choose to benefit from the technology that is made possible by the scientific education of others. A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love

9. Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use.The mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world. The Selfish Gene

10. If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity. They are denying not only the facts of biology but those of physics, geology, cosmology, archaeology, history and chemistry as well. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

11. If you don't understand how somethingworks, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don'tknow how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understandhow memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesisa bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't goto work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. The God Delusion

12. In very different ways, the possibility that the universe is teeming with life, and the opposite possibility that we are totally alone, are equally exciting. Either way, the urge to know more about the universe seems to me irresistible, and I cannot imagine that anybody of truly poetic sensibility could disagree. Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

13. Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever. The Selfish Gene

14. It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.

15. It is interesting to wonder whether taxonomists of the future may regret the way our generation messed around with genomes. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

16. It is the effects on the world of successful active germ-line replicators that we see as adaptations. The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

17. It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

18. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do. The Selfish Gene

19. Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.

20. O darwinismo é uma teoria de processos cumulativos tão lentos que se desenrolam ao longo de milhares e milhões de anos. Todos os nossos juízos intuitivos sobre o que é provável mostram-se errados por larga margem. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

21. Os livros de física podem ser complicados, mas eles, assim como os carros e os computadores, são produtos de objetos biológicos - cérebros humanos. Os objetos e os fenômenos que um livro de física descreve são mais simples que uma única célula do corpo de seu autor. E o autor consiste em trilhões de células, muitas delas diferentes umas das outras, organizadas com arquitetura intrincada e engenharia de precisão para formar uma máquina capaz de escrever um livro. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

22. Prediction in a complex world is a chancy business. Every decision that a survival machine takes is a gamble, and it is the business of genes to program brains in advance so that on average they take decisions that pay off. The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation. The Selfish Gene

23. Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life's hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don't; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions. The Selfish Gene

24. Science is interesting, and if you don't agree you can fuck off.Note: Dawkins was quoting a former editor of New Scientist Magazine, who is as yet unidentified (possibly Jeremy Webb)

25. Science is the poetry of reality.

26. Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.

27. Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. Simulation is both safer and faster. The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have cumulated in subjective consciousness.

28. The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite. Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

29. The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice - or not yet- a decided one. So also is the truth or falsehood of every one of the miracle stories that religions rely upon to impress multitudes of the faithful. The God Delusion

30. The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference. River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life