Richard Dawkins

We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.

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.

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.

Science is the poetry of reality.

Evolution is not a theory, it is a fact.

A meme is a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation.

The more you understand the world, the more you appreciate it.

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

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.

If there is a God, he's a pretty evil fellow.

The gene is the fundamental unit of selection.

Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

The theory of evolution by natural selection is not a theory about how life originated.

Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

It is an excellent idea to think about the world in terms of genes.

The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.

The world is a much more interesting place than any religion has ever made it out to be.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.