Richard Dawkins Quotes

There is a grandeur in this view of life, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful are being evolved

If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.

In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.

I've had a pretty good lesson in human nature. It's more important to try to surround yourself with people who can give you a little happiness, because you only pass through this life once, Jack. You don't come back for an encore.

People always say I'm the Beatle who changed the most, but really that's what I see life is about... you have to change.

Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.

People are too complicated to have simple labels.

It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.

Darwinian evolution is unscientific, unobservable, unbelievable, but understandable in a world that hates God.

If life can emerge just from naturalistic circumstances, then God is out of a job.

Seen in retrospect, evolution as a whole doubtless had a general direction, from simple to complex, from dependence on to relative independence of the environment, to greater and greater autonomy of individuals, greater and greater development of sense organs and nervous systems conveying and processing information about the state of the organism's surroundings, and finally greater and greater consciousness. You can call this direction progress or by some other name.

Books do not make life easier or more simple, but harder and more interesting.

One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.

Simple it's not, I'm afraid you will find, for a mind maker-upper to make up his mind

There is only one group of people who do not have problems, and they are all dead. Problems are a sign of life, so the more problems you have, the more alive you are.

What baffled him was that there should be all this fuss about something so simple as love.

There are a great deal of a great many kinds of love.

You know, you’re a little complicated after all.” “Oh no,” she assured him hastily. “No, I’m not really - I’m just a - I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.

Quality management is needed because nothing is simple anymore, if indeed it ever was.

Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.

Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.

Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.

The Darwinian theory is in principle capable of explaining life. No other theory that has ever been suggested is in principle capable of explaining life.

Which path do you intend to take, Nell?' said the Constable, sounding very interested. 'Conformity or rebellion?' Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded - they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.

One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this law is a measure of its degree of evolution.