Richard Dawkins

A universe with a creator would be a totally different kind of universe, scientifically speaking, than one without.

I've never been the sort of firebrand that I've been made out to be. I'm actually quite a mild person.

How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair defends them on grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a school whose head of science believes the world is less than 10,000 years old.

If there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection.

Coming out as an atheist can cost an academic his or her job in some parts of America, and many choose to keep quiet about their atheism.

I guess the Democrats have to pretend to be more pious than the Republicans because they are under suspicion of not being.

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

Many people want to send their children to faith schools because they get good exam results, but they're not foolish enough to believe that it's because of faith that they get good exam results.

I detest 'Jingle Bells,' 'White Christmas,' 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,' and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.

I would like to find a way in which people in Saudi Arabia could learn that they can be something other than a Muslim. Some people may not realize this. Of course, there is the problem that you can get in trouble or get stoned.

Notoriously, the United States is the most religious of the Western advanced nations. It's a bit mysterious why that is.

Any teaching of falsehoods in science classes should certainly be identified and stopped by school inspectors. School inspectors should be looking at science teachings to make sure they are evidence-based science.

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

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.

I did a film that's on YouTube of me reading hate mail with a woman playing the cello in the background.

In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of 'The Selfish Gene,' I did actually use the metaphor of a 'virus.' So when anybody talks about something going viral on the Internet, that is exactly what a meme is, and it looks as though the word has been appropriated for a subset of that.

I'm afraid the Internet is filled with people using really very intemperate language.

There are risks in the sheer brevity of Twitter, and it's actually quite an elegant art reducing what you have to say to 140 characters, and it's something that I quite enjoy attempting to do.

I've always been very suspicious of the left-right dimension in politics.

A constellation is not an entity at all, not the kind of thing that Uranus, or anything else, can sensibly be said to 'move into.'

Even if 'going retrograde' or 'moving into Aquarius' were real phenomena, something that planets actually do, what influence could they possibly have on human events? A planet is so far away that its gravitational pull on a new-born baby would be swamped by the gravitational pull of the doctor's paunch.

Tortoises can survive for weeks without food or water, easily long enough to float in the Humboldt Current from South America to the Galapagos Islands.

If Bush and Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.

Saddam Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran/Iraq war, of the invasion of Kuwait, and of the subsequent era of sanctions culminating in the current invasion.

Either Jesus had a father, or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it.

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.

God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs.

The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the U.S. leads the world by miles.

When a company seeks a new chief executive officer, or a university a new vice-chancellor, enormous trouble is taken to find the best person.

George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden.

In the 1920s and 1930s, scientists from both the political left and right would not have found the idea of designer babies particularly dangerous - though, of course, they would not have used that phrase.

There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists.

People like to trace their ancestry.

The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe.

I can remember at the age of about six being fascinated by the planets and learning all about Mars and Venus and things.

I have begun several projects which were never completed, not necessarily because they failed, but because I got interested in other things.

To put it bluntly, American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.

Nico Tinbergen was my doctoral supervisor, and he was a benign, avuncular sort of influence; everybody loved him.

I don't actually think 'The Selfish Gene' is a very good title. I think that's one of my worst titles.

I think a fundamentalist is somebody who believes something unshakably and isn't going to change their mind.

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.

We have a huge amount of DNA in common with jellyfish.

I was never much bothered about moral questions like, 'How could there be a good God when there's so much evil in the world?'

I think it's misleading to use a word like 'God' in the way Einstein did. I'm sorry that Einstein did. I think he was asking for trouble, and he certainly was misunderstood.

Public sharing is an important part of science.

In the World Wars, people were perfectly able to shoot other people just because they belonged to the wrong country, without ever asking what their opinions were. Faith too is like that.

A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a jet plane's exhaust. A great improvement on a simple ballistic shell, it still cannot discriminate particular targets. It could not zero in on a designated New York skyscraper if launched from as far away as Boston.

Humans have a proven track record in taking over planes by the use of threats, which work because the legitimate pilots value their own lives and those of their passengers.

If your plane is being hijacked by an armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants to go on living, there is room for bargaining.

The interesting question would be whether there's a Darwinian process, a kind of selection process whereby some memes are more likely to spread than others, because people like them, because they're popular, because they're catchy or whatever it might be.