"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
— The God Delusion, opening to Chapter 2
"There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point. [...] The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed."
— The God Delusion, Chapter 10
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."
— Opening from Unweaving the Rainbow
"The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture."
— Dawkins on religious education
"Some states, e.g. "pregnant", are all-or-none, no intermediates. But sexual abuse has shades of grey, from violent buggery to mild touching."
"Those people who think sexual abuse is a black-or-white, all-or-none category are incapable of clear, logical thought."
"Haven't read Koran so couldn't quote ch&verse. But often say Islam greatest force for evil today."
— Twitter Post
"Mock them. Ridicule them in public. Don’t fall for the convention that we’re all too polite to talk about religion."
— Reason Rally March 24 2012
"All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though."
— Twitter Post
"Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice."
— Twitter Post in reply to someone asking what she should do if she is pregnant with a fetus that has Down's Syndrome.
"I think it's rather pernicious to inculcate into a child a view of the world which includes supernaturalism."
— Dawkins at Cheltenham Science Festival
"Fence-sitting, intellectual cowardice."
— Dawkins on agnostics
"There was an unfortunate misprint — it came out as the Large Hardon Collider. I spotted the misprint and of course I left it in, but alas, the publisher's proofreader also spotted it; she removed it; I begged her on my knees to leave it in, and she said it was more than her job was worth."
— Dawkins explaining a transposition error in his draft for The Greatest Show On Earth
"Listening to the lovely bells of Winchester, one of our great mediaeval cathedrals. So much nicer than the aggressive-sounding “Allahu Akhbar.” Or is that just my cultural upbringing?"
