Richard Dawkins Quotes

Faith itself is a horrible mechanism that stunts the growth of ideas. It also stunts the act of questioning, and it does this by pushing the idea that you have to have faith - and that nothing has to be proven.

Religion works on some people but not on everyone, because it says, 'Stop thinking and accept what I tell you.' That's not valid for people who want to think and reflect.

It is with this as with religion: one usually believes what he has been taught.

Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don't have all the answers to think that they do.

Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business.

From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery.

It's not so much religion per se, it's false certainty that worries me, and religion just has more than its fair share of false certainty or dogmatism. I'm really concerned when I see people pretending to know things they clearly cannot know.

Within orthodoxy, there is always a danger of faith collapsing into fear.

What happens when we put belief in front of reason? When we even put belief above human life?

The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do.

To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.

If you can believe in God, then you can believe in anything. It's a gang mentality.

The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought.

Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.

Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof - of which history offers so many examples - that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science.

A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world.

Islam, or any religion, will become totalitarian if it is made into an ideology, because that is the nature of ideologies.

Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand.

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

To Follow by faith alone is to follow blindly.

Religion leaves no room for human complexity.

Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.

In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.

When a man is required to believe certain doctrines, he is not free to think. A creed is to keep the mind from inquiry. Questions lead to doubt, and doubt is the death of faith.

Never wage war on religion, nor upon seemingly holy institutions, for this thing has too great a force upon the minds of fools.