Richard Dawkins

Genome sequencing has changed taxonomy.

Humans are just a very, very small part of the panoply of life, and it is arguable that in a certain sense, humans have emancipated themselves from Darwinian selection.

I get the feeling more and more that religion is being left behind.

We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.

You can't imagine how gratifying it is to have a reader come up to you and say, 'You changed my life.'

I live in a post-Christian world in Oxford; it is quite rare to meet somebody who is religious in academic life now, and there is absolutely no tendency for rioting and mayhem, and it is extremely civilised.

Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: It gives them something to do.

It's a difficult business, finding out what's true about the world, the universe.

People really, really hate their religion being criticized. It's as though you've said they had an ugly face; they seem to identify personally with it.

Science - or the products of science like technology - is just a way of achieving something real, something that happens, something that works.

What is illiberal is not persuasion but imposition of one's views.

A good theory explains a lot but postulates little.

I do understand people when they say that you destroy the magic of childhood if you encourage too much skeptical questioning.

There's a mystical strain in every country, and eclipses are likely to bring that out.

If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible.

Rather than say he's an atheist, a friend of mine says, 'I'm a tooth fairy agnostic,' meaning he can't disprove God but thinks God is about as likely as the tooth fairy.

It has become almost a cliche 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.

Publishers like a good buzz, and negative responses sell books just as well as positive ones.

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.

Why are we so obsessed with monogamous fidelity?

I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true.