Richard Dawkins - Collected Quotes

"Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends." (Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene", 1976)

"The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale." (Richard Dawkins, "The Blind Watchmaker", 1986)

"The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity." (Richard Dawkins, "The Blind Watchmaker", 1986)

"The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened." (Richard Dawkins, "The Blind Watchmaker", 1986)

"You can be moved to tears by numbers - provided they are encoded and decoded fast enough." (Richard Dawkins, "River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life", 1995)

"Science provokes more hostility than ever, sometimes with good reason, often from people who know nothing about it and use their hostility as an excuse not to learn. Depressingly many people still fall for the discredited cliché that scientific explanation corrodes poetic sensibility." (Richard Dawkins, "Science and Sensibility", [lecture] 1998)

"The fact that we slowly apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discover it, should not subtract from its wonder." (Richard Dawkins, "Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder", 1998)

"However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable." (Richard Dawkins, "The God Delusion", 2006)

"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." (Richard Dawkins, "The God Delusion", 2006)

"The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality." (Richard Dawkins, "The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True", 2011)