All the fossils that we have ever found have always been found in the appropriate place in the time sequence. There are no fossils in the wrong place. – Richard Dawkins
I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That’s very true. – Richard Dawkins
I think there is a sort of box-ticking mentality. Not just in the teaching profession. You hear about it in medicine and nursing. It’s a lawyer-driven insistence on meeting prescribed standards rather than just being a good doctor. – Richard Dawkins
If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, authority, revelation or faith, they will automatically work out for themselves that they are atheists. – Richard Dawkins
Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose. – Richard Dawkins
A good scientific theory is one which is falsifiable, which has not been falsified. – Richard Dawkins
I don’t actually think ‘The Selfish Gene’ is a very good title. I think that’s one of my worst titles. – Richard Dawkins
There’s clearly a lot of Ludditism, and you see it in all the hysteria about every scientific story. – Richard Dawkins
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. – Richard Dawkins
Of course in science there are things that are open to doubt and things need to be discussed. But among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know. – Richard Dawkins
I didn’t have a very starry school career, I was medium to above average, nothing special. – Richard Dawkins
Isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it? – Richard Dawkins
The usefulness of science is sometimes exaggerated. You’d never talk about music being useful or art being useful. – Richard Dawkins
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time. – Richard Dawkins
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. – Richard Dawkins
You can’t understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can’t recognise biblical allusions. – Richard Dawkins
There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn’t be too surprised about that because we’re evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can’t cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity. – Richard Dawkins
There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can’t prove that there aren’t any, so shouldn’t we be agnostic with respect to fairies? – Richard Dawkins
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. – Richard Dawkins
Teachers who help to open young minds perform a duty which is as near sacred as I will admit. – Richard Dawkins
Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated social evolution. – Richard Dawkins
Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing – a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe. – Richard Dawkins
For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator – the gene. – Richard Dawkins
Sometimes I think it’s possible to mistake desire for clarity and talking in a no-nonsense way for aggression. – Richard Dawkins
I certainly would absolutely never do what some of my American colleagues do and object to religious symbols being used, putting crosses up in the public square and things like that. I don’t fret about that at all; I’m quite happy about that. – Richard Dawkins
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. – Richard Dawkins
Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs. – Richard Dawkins