Richard Dawkins Quotes

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

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

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

Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth.

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by the truth.

One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.

A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.

I think a misconception among many non-religious people is that anyone with a strong faith is, in all ways and at all times, blindly consistent, unwavering, unquestioning.

To Follow by faith alone is to follow blindly.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

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.

If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there's something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.

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

When a person is determined to believe something, the very absurdity of the doctrine confirms them in their faith.

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.

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

I have noticed that many who do not believe in God believe in everything else, even in the evil eye.

I've never been impressed with bureaucratic tradition. I don't like it when the parties come to me and say, 'This is the way that it's always done, judge.' I never found anything in the oath I took or the statutes I was asked to look at that said, 'Judge, stop thinking, because this is the way it was done before.'

Action and faith enslave thought, both of them in order not be troubled or inconvenienced by reflection, criticism, and doubt.

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.

Faith... must be enforced by reason... when faith becomes blind it dies.

If men were but to read the New Testament with the same tone and emphasis, with which they do other books, and were to keep out of mind the idea of its being sacred, they would be disgusted with the credulity, and the want of intellect, reason and judgment, that is apparent in it.

Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along by every wind of teaching, look like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards.