Richard Dawkins

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.

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

Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye.

The God Hypothesis is a scientific hypothesis about the universe, which should be analyzed as skeptically as any other.

The selfish gene theory is Darwin's theory, expressed in a way that Darwin did not choose but whose aptness, I should like to think, he would instantly have recognized and delighted in.

What is really pernicious is the practice of teaching children that faith itself is a virtue. Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.

The universe is not fine-tuned for humanity. Humanity is fine-tuned to the universe.

I am thrilled to be alive at a time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.

The process that designed life was, in fact, a blind process.

One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.

Time and again, religion acts as a sanctimonious smoke screen for baser, political motives.

The human brain runs first-class simulation software.

If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it.

The essence of a scientific theory is that it makes predictions which could be falsified.

Atheists do not have faith; and reason, logic and evidence are the very antithesis of faith. Faith is the belief in spite of, or perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear.

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

The illusion of purpose is so powerful that biologists themselves use the assumption of good design as a working tool.