Richard Dawkins Quotes

While science and technology play critical roles in sustaining modern civilization, they are not part of our culture in the sense that they are not commonly studied or well comprehended. Neither the potential nor the limitations of science are understood so that what can be achieved and what is beyond reach are not comprehended.

The music wasn't going to happen, and I realized I had read so little. I didn't know my way around any century. I was very under read.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

In my schooling through high school, I excelled mainly in chemistry, physics and mathematics.

I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

There is no excuse for letting another generation be as vastly ignorant, or as devoid of understanding … as we are ourselves.

In every thing that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world.

Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.

It is precisely because it is fashionable for Americans to know no science, even though they may be well educated otherwise, that they so easily fall prey to nonsense.

The elimination of ignorance, of illiteracy... and of needless inequalities in opportunities (is) to be seen as objectives that are valued for their own sake. They expand our freedom to lead the lives we have reason to value, and these elementary capabilities are of importance on their own

The abuse of books kills science. Believing that we know what we have read, we believe that we can dispense with learning it.

My mum taught me how to read before I went to kindergarden, I always thought that being able to read provided lightness, help to dispel darkness, ignorance and stupidity.

The 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with those three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.

Do you know how to read?" "No. It is one of the black arts." He nodded. "But a useful one," he said.

Reading is the way out of ignorance, and the road to achievement.

A man who chooses not to read is just as ignorant as a man who cannot read.

Science is not just a topic we can step around or ignore.

Wicked people never have time for reading. It's one of the reasons for their wickedness.

I liked science. It was about the only thing that stayed the same wherever we moved.

Witchcraft to the ignorant, .... Simple science to the learned.

You gotta learn the alphabet, backwards and forwards. And then the choice is yours, 'cause last I looked, the Bible is written in the same words, the exact same alphabet, as my favorite pornography. Choice is yours.

Scientific literacy is one of the underpinnings of everything I do. It's why I work with schools. It's why I teach at university. I do a lot of outreach to try and improve general scientific literacy, but the core of all scientific literacy is just literacy.

You'll often hear the phrase "science doesn't know everything." Well, of course it doesn't know everything. But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean that it knows nothing.