Richard Dawkins Quotes

We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take a great moral ideal and achieve it merely by law.

Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction: but laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourage and help to preserve it; but they cannot originate it.

I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.

As long as the law exists, there will be morality.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government.

There is a difference … between the demise of morality laws and the demise of morality

Humans are the only ones who are the custodians of other people's morals.

I think that moral philosophy is useful for framing questions, but terrible at answering them. I think moral psychology is booming right now, and we're making a lot of progress on understanding how we actually work, what our moral nature is.

I always expect people to behave much better than I do. When they actually behave worse, I am frankly incredulous.

Never create by law what can be accomplished by morality.

Ethics evolve naturally, and we trample upon them with laws created by reason and experience.

The law is not an end in itself, nor does it provide ends. It is preeminently a means to serve what we think is right.

We make a big mistake when we conclude that the law is the answer to bad behavior. In fact, the law alone stirs up more of such behavior. People get worse, not better, when you lay down the law. To be sure, the Spirit does use both God's law and God's gospel in our sanctification. But the law and the gospel do very different things.

Education is the constraining and directing of youth towards that right reason, which the law affirms, and which the experience of the best of our elders has agreed to be truly right.

I think that there are certain principles which should guide decision-making for a president. One such principle was that we're all God's children, and every life is precious. To me, that's a moral statement.

So many laws argues so many sins.

The first duty of a university is to teach wisdom, not trade; character, not technicalities.

If people find that controversial then I would just refer them to the Sermon on the Mount.

The law, for all its failings, has a noble goal - to make the little bit of life that people can actually control more just. We can't end disease or natural disasters, but we can devise rules for our dealings with one another that fairly weigh the rights and needs of everyone, and which, therefore, reflect our best vision of ourselves.

I think that ethical behaviour is another feature of the kind of inner discipline that leads to a happier existence.

The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. Try to make people moral, and you lay the groundwork for vice.

Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.

How do you prevent people from doing inappropriate things? We can write laws. But at the end of the day, I actually wonder what the board was doing.

Conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation.

What you think in your own mind to be good, or what people of the world think is good, is not necessarily good.