Richard Dawkins

Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose. Accounts of Jesus's resurrection and ascension are about as well-documented as Jack and the Beanstalk.

From a Darwinian perspective, it is clear what pain is doing. It's a warning: 'Don't do that again.' If you burn yourself, you're never going to pick up a live coal again.

Science coverage could be improved by the recognition that science is timeless, and therefore science stories should not need to be pegged to an item in the news.

I did not end up as broadly educated as my Cambridge colleagues, but I graduated probably better equipped to write a book on my chosen subject.

I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.

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

Compassionate doctors sometimes lie to patients about the severity of their condition, and it is not always wrong to do so.

A good scientific theory is one which is falsifiable, which has not been falsified.

My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.

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

Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it's a time for reflection, a time for memory, a time for regret.

You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.

I was confirmed at my prep school at the age of 13.

Evolution never looks to the future.

I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.

The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it - language, art, science - seemed to have evolved only once. The eye, by contrast, independently evolved 40 times. So, if you were to 'replay' evolution, the eye would almost certainly appear again, whereas the big brain probably wouldn't.

Christopher Hitchens was a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion far wider than anybody I know.

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.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.

I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' or 'Islamic children.'

I think I would abolish schools which systematically inculcate sectarian beliefs.

I have a strong feeling that the subject of evolution is beautiful without the excuse of creationists needing to be bashed.

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

The feminists taught us about consciousness-raising.

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

I think there is a sort of box-ticking mentality. Not just in the teaching profession. You hear about it in medicine and nursing. It's a lawyer-driven insistence on meeting prescribed standards rather than just being a good doctor.

I am baffled by the way sophisticated theologians who know Adam and Eve never existed still keep talking about it.

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity.

If I say that I am more interested in preventing the slaughter of large whales than I am in improving housing conditions for people, I am likely to shock some of my friends.

When brains get sufficiently big, presumably, as human brains have, consciousness seems to emerge.

The supernatural is ubiquitous in children's entertainment, from Grimm and Hans Andersen to Disney and 'Harry Potter.'

Genome sequencing has changed taxonomy.

As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.

Of course in science there are things that are open to doubt and things need to be discussed. But among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know.

The earliest books in the New Testament to be written were the Epistles, not the Gospels. It's almost as though Saint Paul and others who wrote the Epistles weren't that interested in whether Jesus was real.

Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.

I'm pretty sure there is some genetic component towards intelligence.

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

You can legally lie about the real world to your heart's content, but until some human being is materially damaged, nobody will complain.

People say I'm shrill and strident.

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

You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.

I love words.

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.

It is possible in medicine, even when you intend to do good, to do harm instead. That is why science thrives on actively encouraging criticism rather than stifling it.

It would be intolerant if I advocated the banning of religion, but of course I never have.

Christopher Hitchens was a great warrior, a magnificent orator, a pugilist and a gentleman. He was kind, but he took no prisoners when arguing with idiots.