Quote

If we ever talk to aliens, their civilisation will be far more advanced than ours (because of distances involved). They won't be religious!

Richard Dawkins

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
Actor
Author
Biologist
Epistemologist
Essayist
Ethologist
Evolutionary Biologist
Geneticist
Science Communicator
Science Writer
Screenwriter
Kenya's capital
Clinton Richard Dawkins
Clinton Dawkins
C. Richard Dawkins
C. Dawkins
CR Dawkins
R. Dawkins
Advanced
Aliens
Distance
Involved
Talk
Religious
Ever
Distances
Civilisation

More quotes by Richard Dawkins

Image
The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Cloning may be good and it may be bad. Probably it's a bit of both. The question must not be greeted with reflex hysteria but decided quietly, soberly and on its own merits. We need less emotion and more thought.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.
Richard Dawkins
Image
The beauty of evolution is that it does provide an explanation of how you can get complexity out of simplicity. It does it by slow, gradual degree. At no point are you postulating the sudden coming into existence of a complicated being.
Richard Dawkins
Image
An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Richard Dawkins
Image
You don't believe that the Earth is round only if you're an astronaut. You don't believe Napoleon existed only if you're a historian. You believe these things because they're facts, proved by evidence.
Richard Dawkins
Image
There is a whole field of inquiry that has come up in the last 30 or 40 years - some call it sociobiology or evolutionary psychology - relating to where we get our moral sense and why we value the idea of altruism, and locating both answers in behavioral adaptations for the preservation of our genes.
Richard Dawkins
Image
There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?
Richard Dawkins
Image
The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.
Richard Dawkins
Image
If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.
Richard Dawkins
Image
It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine.
Richard Dawkins
Image
I hate the neologism owned for scored a victory over. I have no intention of owning anyone, and nobody will ever own me.
Richard Dawkins
Image
I've always been antagonistic to any naïve application of the selfish gene theory to politics. Some people have attempted to suggest that it means we are selfish or we should be selfish.
Richard Dawkins
Image
All qualified physicists, biologists, cosmologists and geologists agree, on the basis of massive, mutually corroborating evidence, that the earth's age is at least four billion years.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.
Richard Dawkins
Image
Religion is the root of quite a lot of evil.
Richard Dawkins
Image
The whole of technology depends on a scientific background, and of course technology can be used for evil purposes. You can't blame science for that.
Richard Dawkins
Image
What's wrong with being elitist if you are trying to encourage people to join the elite rather than being exclusive?
Richard Dawkins
Image
Again, it is belief without evidence. In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science, because it was for the good of the Communist Party.
Richard Dawkins
Image
The Roman Catholic Church is an institution for whose gains the phrase ill-gotten might have been specially invented. And of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history, the medieval equivalent of the Nigerian Internet scam but far more successful.
Richard Dawkins