Richard Dawkins Quotes

We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn betrays its ancestor.

What is not hereditary cannot be permanent.

If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children.

Textbooks describe DNA as a blueprint for a body. It's better seen as a recipe for making a body, because it is irreversible. But today I want to present it as something different again, and even more intriguing. The DNA in you is a coded description of ancient worlds in which your ancestors lived. DNA is the wisdom out of the old days, and I mean very old days indeed.

A father can pass on his nose and eyes and even his intelligence to his child, but not his soul. In every human being the soul is new

There is divine beauty in learning... To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps.

I love teaching. It's a job that lasts forever. Whatever you teach children today travels with them far into the future.

Grampa took Mary Ellen inside away from the crowd. "Now, child, I am going to show you what my father showed me, and his father before," he said quietly. He spooned the honey onto the cover of one of her books. "Taste," he said, almost in a whisper. . . . "There is such sweetness inside of that book too!" he said thoughtfully. "Such things...adventure, knowledge and wisdom. But these things do not come easily. You have to pursue them. Just like we ran after the bees to find their tree, so you must also chase these things through the pages of a book!

The lesson I've learned the most often in life is that you're always going to know more in the future than you know now.

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.

It’s not about keeping up the population, it’s about passing on who we are and what we've learned, so things keep going. So we don’t just end.

We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia... Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today.

But I hope to maintain my credibility after I stop playing. Because, yes of course, now I play and I score goals and children all over are mad about me. Not just poor children - all children. We can make them really happy by the way we play, though I have to say that it's the poor ones that I think of most, the ones who can't come and watch the games at the stadium. We mean so much to them. That's why I'm so committed to this work. Later, after you've stopped playing, it's harder to have the same impact. But I will give it a go. I want to continue doing this kind of work for ever.

When an elder turns to face the dead, that means he turns away from facing the future and his own retirement in Phoenix, let's say. He turns and finds himself facing the children.

That is the greatest gift my books have given me; what it means and has done for the kids.

There is no such thing as education. The thing is merely a loose phrase for the passing on to others of whatever truth or virtue we happen to have ourselves. It is typical of our time that the more doubtful we are about the value of philosophy, the more certain we are about the value of education. That is to say, the more doubtful we are about whether we have any truth, the more certain we are (apparently) that we can teach it to our children.

I hold that a strongly marked personality can influence descendants for generations.

Heredity is a splendid phenomenon that relieves us of responsibility for our shortcomings.

There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care. All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight. It takes forty-one seconds to climb a ladder three stories tall. It's not easy to imagine the year 3012, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. We have new capabilities now—strange powers we're still getting used to. The mountains are a message from Aldrag the Wyrm-Father. Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.

I have the impression that the new generation of young people, are coming up on the scene with a sense "ancestorhood", and with more wisdom than was evident before.

The child is both a hope and a promise for mankind.

There are things to be learned even from the dead.

Things change, people change, but that doesn't mean you should forget the past.

Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.

Etymologically, the word education means just a process of leading or bringing up.