Richard Dawkins

We are a unique ape. We have language. Other animals have systems of communication that fall far short of that. They don't have the same ability to communicate complicated conditionals and what-ifs and talk about things that are not present.

If you read Islamic creationist literature, it's pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.

I can handle heckling on evolution because it's my own field.

In Britain, you don't usually learn about evolution until you are about 15. I should have thought that you should start at about 8. But I could be wrong about that.

I'm not much given to straight, irony-free hero-worship.

I would like people to appreciate science in the same way they appreciate the arts.

The usefulness of science is sometimes exaggerated. You'd never talk about music being useful or art being useful.

We have to find our own purposes in life, which are not derived directly from our scientific history.

There is something cheap about magic that works just because it is magic.

I sympathize with politicians who have to watch every syllable they utter for fear it will be misused by somebody with an agenda.

In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science because it was for the good of the Communist Party.

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

I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there's a scientific lesson, for example - when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That's actually very valuable.

I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition.

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

I think the written word is probably the best medium of communication because you have time to reflect, you have time to choose your words, to get your sentences exactly right. Whereas when you're being interviewed, say, you have to talk on the fly, you have to improvise, you can change sentences around, and they're not exactly right.

It doesn't hurt my feeling when I get vilified by fundamentalist religious people. I've actually made comedy out of it. I've made light of that.

I don't do formal debates, because formal debates where you have two people up on a stage in equal status, and each of them is given 20 minutes to give their point of view, and then 10 minutes for a rebuttal, or whatever, that creates the illusion that you really do have here two equal points of view of equal scientific standing.

I didn't know children were expected to have literary heroes, but I certainly had one, and I even identified with him at one time: Doctor Dolittle, whom I now half identify with the Charles Darwin of Beagle days.

It is a lamentable observation that because of the way our laws are skewed toward the plaintiff, London has become the libel capital of the world.

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.

I think my love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western countries is betraying itself where Islam is concerned.

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

Even if you believe a creator god invented the laws of physics, would you so insult him as to suggest that he might capriciously and arbitrarily violate them in order to walk on water, or turn water into wine as a cheap party trick at a wedding?

It's a horrible idea that God, this paragon of wisdom and knowledge, power, couldn't think of a better way to forgive us our sins than to come down to Earth in his alter ego as his son and have himself hideously tortured and executed so that he could forgive himself.

Nothing is wrong with peace and love. It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ's followers seem to disagree.

I love romantic poetry.

I'm quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.

Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam.

To an honest judge, the alleged marriage between religion and science is a shallow, empty, spin-doctored sham.

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.

The central dogma of the New Testament is that Jesus died as a scapegoat for the sin of Adam and the sins that all we unborn generations might have been contemplating in the future. Adam's sin is perhaps mitigated by the extenuating circumstance that he didn't exist.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

Do you advocate the Ten Commandments as a guide to the good life? Then I can only presume that you don't know the Ten Commandments.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

Beauty arises out of human inspiration.

When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.

All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation.