Richard Dawkins

People who do not know the Bible well have been gulled into thinking it is a good guide to morality. This mistaken view may have motivated the "millionaire Conservative party donors". I have even heard the cynically misanthropic opinion that, without the Bible as a moral compass, people would have no restraint against murder, theft and mayhem. The surest way to disabuse yourself of this pernicious falsehood is to read the Bible itself.

Atheism is not a religion. Abstinence is not a sex position.

Sometimes in life it is a good idea to stop,sometimes it is a good idea to go on. The trick is to decide when to stop

Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.

No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth.

Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think that the Universe began after the domestication of the dog?

In a way, I think religion is to be admired for asking the right questions. I just think it's got the wrong answers.

You believe that all humanity came from Adam and Eve, and humans have not evolved at all since. So tell me; between the two of them, which was black, which was white, and which was Asian?

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

Religious people are atheists about all other gods, atheists only take it one god further.

Chaos theory, a more recent invention, is equally fertile ground for those with a bent for abusing sense. It is unfortunately named, for 'chaos' implies randomness. Chaos in the technical sense is not random at all. It is completely determined, but it depends hugely, in strangely hard-to-predict ways, on tiny differences in initial conditions.

It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests.

I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research.

I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist.

Evolution never looks to the future.

Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.

At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes.

I'm a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims.

The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.

The universe doesn't owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn't owe us a nice warm feeling inside.