Richard Dawkins

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all 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.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.

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

Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

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 God Hypothesis is unnecessary. You don't need it to explain anything in the universe.

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

Individual human beings may be beautiful and interesting, but they are also insignificant.

We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object's sole reason for living.