Richard Dawkins Quotes

Since the Renaissance, a concept called 'progress' has been baked into our society. Progress - founded on an accumulation of knowledge through experience (and in the case of science, through experiment). To build on the past rather than endlessly relive it. That's what separates us from the beasts.

So with each advance in understanding come new questions. So we need to be very humble. We shouldn’t have hubris and think that we can understand everything. But history tells us that there is good reason to believe that we will continue making fantastic progress in the years ahead.

The history of science is a record of the transformations of contempts amd amusements.

There is no knowledge and science like pondering and thought; and there is no prosperity and advancement like knowledge and science.

The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.

… ideas are structures built over time, each part added by a new generation.

The history is important because science is a discipline deeply immersed in history. In other words, every time you perform an experiment in science or in medicine, what you're actually doing is you're answering someone, answering a question raised by someone in the past.

The accumulation of knowledge is a powerful thing.

Only by ignorance is science threatened.

Everyone who's rational should have an interest in science. The future of our planet depends on our understanding of science... It's something I value immensely.

[we see that] science is eminently perfectible, and that each theory has constantly to give way to a fresh one.

Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.

A great discovery is a fact whose appearance in science gives rise to shining ideas, whose light dispels many obscurities and shows us new paths.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

Unlike physical progress, which is subject to natural restrictions, the qualities of the mind can be developed limitlessly.

Science is the only news. When you scan a news portal or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same cyclical dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness; even the technology is predictable if you know the science behind it. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly

No power and no treasure can outweigh the extension of our knowledge.

Again there is another great and powerful cause why the sciences have made but little progress; which is this. It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.

The universe must not be narrowed down to the limit of our understanding, but our understanding must be stretched and enlarged to take in the image of the universe as it is discovered.

Education brightens a darkened world.

Scientific Progress goes boink?

...those experiments be not only esteemed which have an immediate and present use, but those principally which are of most universal consequence for invention of other experiments, and those which give more light to the invention of causes; for the invention of the mariner's needle, which giveth the direction, is of no less benefit for navigation than the invention of the sails, which give the motion.

We're nothing without science. Nothing.

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.

A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance.