Richard Dawkins Quotes

If your library is not 'unsafe', it probably isn't doing its job.

If you're an adult and you choose not to believe in science, fine, but please don't prevent your children from learning about it and letting them draw their own conclusions.

The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.

We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.

In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

Science is a way of getting knowledge. It's a method. It's a method that really relies on making mistakes. We propose ideas, they are usually wrong, and we test them against the data. Scientists do this in a formal way. It's a way that everyone can go through life; that's how we should be teaching science from a very young age.

The Enlightenment ideal, which all universities claim to endorse, is that everyone should think for themselves.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

I had learned that science is a rewarding, active process of discovery, not the passive absorption of what others had discovered.

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

It will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring what belief is most in harmony with their system.

Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.

In science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.

Science is a self-sufficient activity.

As a writer, I am an intellectual. I believe in the ideals of the Enlightenment, I believe in the written word, in dialogue and in truth. I hate lies more than anything else. Most of the time I react by writing.

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

A university's essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism - a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

Education has failed in a very serious way to convey the most important lesson science can teach: skepticism.

Academic freedom is being lost by a great many people who dare to challenge Darwinism. That's a terrifying situation. That's contrary to the principles of science.

Schools ought to teach students to challenge secular ideologies masquerading as science in the classroom.

Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book and creed and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free.

Science exists, moreover, only as a journey toward truth. Stifle dissent and you end that journey.

Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.

If we would guide by the light of reason we must let our minds be bold.