Richard Dawkins

The world is a beautiful place, and it's even more beautiful when you understand how it works.

If you want to understand the world, you have to use your brain, not your faith.

The universe is a cold, hard place, but it's also a place of immense beauty and wonder.

Religion is a comfort blanket for adults.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

We are privileged to be alive, to be conscious, to be able to understand the universe.

The universe doesn't care what you believe.

Science is the ultimate truth-seeking machine.

The world is not a stage for our drama, it is a stage for the drama of life itself.

A universe with a God would be a very different kind of universe, and it would be a universe in which the laws of physics were not the ultimate explanation.

The meme for blind faith lives on, and propagates itself, if only because it is so useful to the powerful.

The fact that life exists at all is a statistical anomaly. The fact that it exists in such profusion and diversity is a miracle, but a natural miracle.

If you want to understand the universe, you have to understand evolution.

The only difference between a cult and a religion is the amount of real estate they own.

The gene is the fundamental unit of selection, not the individual, not the group, not the species.

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

I'm not an atheist who believes in God. I'm an atheist who doesn't believe in God.

If you want to be a serious scientist, you have to be prepared to be wrong.

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If God exists, he is a very incompetent designer.

I am a passionate skeptic.