All Quotes

"How do we account for the current paranormal vogue in the popular media? Perhaps it has something to do with the millennium – in which case it's depressing to realise that the millennium is still three years away."

"You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells."

"You don't have to be a scientist – you don't have to play the Bunsen burner – in order to understand enough science to overtake your imagined need and fill that fancied gap. Science needs to be released from the lab into the culture."

"The Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation...claims...the "Whole substance" of the wine is converted into the blood of Christ,; the appearance of wine that remains is "merely accidental", "inhering in no substance". Transubstantiation is colloquially taught as meaning that the wine "literally" turns into the blood of Christ. Whether in its obfuscatory Aristotelian or its franker colloquial form, the claim of transubstantiation can be made only if we do serious violence to the normal meanings of words like 'substance' and 'literally'."

"Natural selection is like artificial selection, but without the human chooser. Instead of a human deciding which offspring shall die in which shall reproduce, nature ‘decides’. The quotation marks are vital because nature doesn’t consciously decide. This might seem too obvious to emphasize, but you’d be surprised by the number of people who think natural selection implies some kind of personal choice. They couldn’t be more wrong. It just is the case that some offspring are more likely to die while others have what it takes to survive and reproduce. Therefore, as the generations go by, the average, typical creature in the population becomes ever better at the arts of surviving and reproducing. Ever better, I should specify, when, when measured against some absolute standard."

"Orb webs in real life do their business largely in two dimensions. If the mesh is too coarse, flies pass straight through. If the mesh is too fine, rival spiders will achieve nearly the same result at less cost in silk, and will therefore leave behind more progeny to carry on their economically more prudent genes. Natural selection finds the efficient compromise."

"In fact writing a computer program is a pretty good way to summarize knowledge about any set of rules."

"Natural selection is an extremely simple process, in the sense that very little machinery needs to be set up in order for it to work. Of course the effects and consequences of natural selection are complex in the extreme. But in order to set natural selection going on a real planet, all that is required is the existence of inherited information."

"To this day, and in quarters where they should know better, Darwinism is widely regarded as a theory of ‘chance’. It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn’t work. You don’t need to be a mathematician or physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck. Far from being a difficulty peculiar to Darwinism, the astronomic improbability of eyes and knees, enzymes and elbow joints and the other living wonders is precisely the problem that any theory of life must solve, and that Darwinism uniquely does solve."

"It is easy to think of DNA as the information by which a body makes another body like itself. It would be more correct to see a body as the vehicle used by DNA to make more DNA like itself."

"There is no doubt that whales and dugongs come with their dry-land history written all over them. If they had been deliberately created for the sea, they’d be very different, and a lot more like fish than they are. Animals that have their history written all over them are among the most graphic pieces of evidence we have that living things were not created for their present ways of life but evolved from very different ancestors."

"Darwin, however, saw his doubts as a challenge to go on thinking, not a welcome excuse to give up."

"The plaint that there hasn’t been enough time for the eye to evolve turns out to be not just wrong but dramatically, decisively, ignominiously wrong."

"On one point, though, I insist. This is that wherever in nature there is a sufficiently powerful illusion of good design for some purpose, natural selection is the only known mechanism that can account for it."

"The attitude that living things are placed here for our benefit still dominates our culture, even where its underpinnings have disappeared. We now need, for purposes of scientific understanding, to find a less human-centered view of the natural world."

"The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite."

"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 outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."

"[If] there is mercy in nature, it is accidental. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent."

"But it is we that choose to divide animals up into discontinuous species. On the evolutionary view of life there must have been intermediates, even though, conveniently for our naming rituals, they are usually extinct."

"We admit that we are like , but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes — the and orangutans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans but excludes humans."

"Molecular evidence suggests that our common ancestor with chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between five and seven million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards ... in your left hand you hold the right hand of your mother. In turn she holds the hand of her mother, your grandmother. Your grandmother holds her mother's hand, and so on ... How far do we have to go until we reach our common ancestor with the chimpanzees? It is a surprisingly short way. Allowing one yard per person, we arrive at the ancestor we share with chimpanzees in under 300 miles."

"My last vestige of "hands-off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11, 2001, followed by the "National Day of Prayer", when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonation and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place."

"My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a 'they' as opposed to a 'we' can be identified at all."

"Religion is the most inflammatory enemy-labelling device in history."

"To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic."

"This is where they come into their own, for there's money in hope: the more desperate the hope, the richer the pickings."

"The human mind is a wanton storyteller and even more, a profligate seeker after pattern. We see faces in clouds and tortillas, fortunes in tea leaves and planetary movements. It is quite difficult to prove a real pattern as distinct from a superficial illusion."

"There is more than just grandeur in this view of life, bleak and cold though it can seem from under the security blanket of ignorance. There is deep refreshment to be had from standing up and facing straight into the strong keen wind of understanding: Yeats's 'Winds that blow through the starry ways'."

"Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: 'Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?' And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: 'What kind of evidence is there for that?' And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say."

"I want to examine that dangerous thing that's common to Judaism and Christianity as well: the process of non-thinking called "faith". (Part 1, 00:00:55)"

"Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time."

"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."

"If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them? Who's God trying to impress? Presumably himself, since he is judge and jury, as well as execution victim. (Part 2, 00:29:56)"

"Yousef Al-Khattab: When you take the women and dress them like whores, on the street... Richard Dawkins: I don't dress women, they dress themselves... Yousef Al-Khattab: But you allow it as a norm, to let the women go on the street dressed like this. What's going on with your society?"

"I do remember one formative influence in my undergraduate life. There was an elderly professor in my department who had been passionately keen on a particular theory for, oh, a number of years, and one day an American visiting researcher came and he completely and utterly disproved our old man's hypothesis. The old man strode to the front, shook his hand and said, "My dear fellow, I wish to thank you, I have been wrong these fifteen years". And we all clapped our hands raw. That was the scientific ideal, of somebody who had a lot invested, a lifetime almost invested in a theory, and he was rejoicing that he had been shown wrong and that scientific truth had been advanced. (Part 1, 00:13:32)"

"Of course politics are important — Iraq, Palestine, even social deprivation in Bradford. But as we wake up to this huge challenge to our civilised values, don't let's forget the elephant in the room — an elephant called "religion". (Part 1, 00:00:24)"

"I want to say that killing for God is not only hideous murder — it is also utterly ridiculous. (Part 1, 00:44:39)"

"And when we look closely, we find a system of morals which any civilised person today should surely find poisonous."

"— But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life. — What? says Alf. — Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred."

"Love loves to love love."

"Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me. Gob, the citizen made a plunge back into the shop. — By Jesus, says he, I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will."

"And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe's in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel."

"Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman for as he came naked forth from his mother's womb so naked shall he wend him at the last for to go as he came."

"It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born."

"Absence makes the heart grow younger."

"But O, oblige me by taking away that knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history."

"At the same time he inwardly chuckled over his repartee to the blood and ouns champion about his God being a jew. People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them up was a bite from a sheep."

"The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit."

"He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation."

"If he had smiled why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity."