Richard Dawkins Quotes

I don't think of kids as a lower form of the human species.

I'm a human being before anything else.

If an alien race lands on the planet Earth tomorrow and asks me to prove I'm really here, what do I do? What do I give them? What do I tell them? What do I show them? I can't sing or dance. I can't paint. I've never built anything, and I've never contributed anything significant to the human race.

A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do, Nothing else.

You shouldn't say 'animals' to distinguish between humans and non-humans. We are all animals.

I talk to younger actor types, and they bring up that word, 'brand,' and it's like, 'All right, if that's the way you want to look at yourself.' Diet Pepsi's a brand; you're a human being.

I've always had this fascination with the brain. I'm not really much of a religious person, but like anybody, you are at least fascinated by what some call a soul - what I would call the brain - and who we are and how we work.

Homo sapiens, you and me, we are basically the same as people 10,000 years ago. The next revolution will change that.

Obviously, I'm not a Neanderthal. I do do laundry. I am a human being.

Beware of self-righteousness. The black devil of licentiousness destroys his hundreds, but the white devil of self-righteousness destroys his thousands.

I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity? Are we sure it is desirable for a man's spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?

If there is any characteristic that is distinctly human, it is the capability for reflective self-consciousness.

A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.

For better or worse, man is the tool-using animal, and as such he has become the lord of creation. When he is lord also of himself, he will deserve his self-chosen title homo sapiens.

I believe that it is made out of the same cloth of mind, but it is an add-on, it was something that was specialized to create what we call the self. And it exists for very special purposes and it has very special, and I think by and large good consequences, although not only good consequences.

We are unique, each human voice, not because we are completely self-generated, but because of who we choose to assemble the countless factors that made us.

History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

If behind popular fascination with Freudian theory there was a nervous, often guilty preoccupation with the self as sexual, behind increasing interest in computational interpretations of mind is an equally nervous preoccupation with the self as machine.

The ruthlessness born of self-seeking is ineffectual compared with the ruthlessness sustained by dedication to a holy cause. God wishes, said Calvin, that one should put aside all humanity when it is a question of striving for His glory.

Your whole life is a message. Every act is an act of self-definition . Everything you think, say and do sends a message about you.

We are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design.

To abjure the notion of the truly human is to abjure the attempt to divinize the self as a replacement for a divinized world.

There seems to be no unexpressed self in animals, as if they are as fully themselves in flesh as possible, with no lag of consciousness to fill up, while we keep trying to grow into something else.

You cannot have a boundary-less existence, because your neighbor has his own boundaries, and who is going to give you the ethics between the two boundaries? If there is no objective moral law, relativism will take hold, and relativism ultimately will lead to self-destruction.