Richard Dawkins Quotes

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.

I am an atheist and I consider religions to be a form of collective neurosis. I am not an enemy of the Catholics, as I am not an enemy of the tuberculars, the myopic or the paralytics; you cannot be an enemy of the sick, only their good friend in order to help them cure themselves.

Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.

Religion is everywhere. There are no human societies without it, whether they acknowledge it as a religion or not.

I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events.

Rivers, ponds, lakes and streams - they all have different names, but they all contain water. Just as religions do - they all contain truths.

It is certain that if you would have the whole secret of a people, you must enter into the intimacy of their religion.

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.

The deepest difference between religions is not that between polytheism and monotheism.

I do not purpose to discuss faith in its dogmatic sense today.

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion--several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven....

I'm fascinated by the business of belief, obviously, because it's so ever present with humanity anyway. And, you know, when you have science, which constantly talks of proofs, you have religion, which constantly talks of beliefs and faith and so on.

Religon is misunderstood mythology

Religious and philosophical beliefs are, indeed, as dangerous as fire, and nothing can take from them that beauty of danger. But there is only one way of really guarding ourselves against the excessive danger of them, and that is to be steeped in philosophy and soaked in religion.

If you believe that man is inherently flawed-what religious people call 'original sin'-it follows that man, if left to his own devices, will tend towards ego-driven disharmony. Traditionalist conservatives know that absent the restraining hand of religion, tradition, or the state, there is nothing to prevent human beings from acting in ways contrary to their own best interests, or those of the community.

There is nothing in religion but fiction.

Sekts and creeds ov religion, are like pocket compesses, good enuff tu pinte out the direction, but the nearer the pole yu git thewuss tha wurk.

Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.

Conservatives are more religious than liberals--although there is no evidence that they're nicer people because of it.

Religion is still parasitic in the interstices of our knowledge which have not yet been filled. Like bed-bugs in the cracks of walls and furniture, miracles lurk in the lacunae of science. The scientist plasters up these cracks in our knowledge; the more militant Rationalist swats the bugs in the open. Both have their proper sphere and they should realize that they are allies.

I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have a great respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution and paleontology).

Religion began when the first scoundrel met the first fool.

The whole thing [religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.

Religion supports nobody. It has to be supported. It produces no wheat, no corn; it ploughs no land; it fells no forests. It is a perpetual mendicant. It lives on the labors of others, and then has the arrogance to pretend that it supports the giver.