Richard Dawkins Quotes

“A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee.”

“A male on the other hand can never get enough copulations with as many different females as possible: the word excess has no meaning for a male.”

“Contraception is sometimes attacked as ‘unnatural’. So it is, very unnatural. The trouble is, so is the welfare state. I think that most of us believe the welfare state is highly desirable. But you cannot have an unnatural welfare state, unless you also have unnatural birth control; otherwise, the end result will be misery even greater than that which obtains in nature.”

“Curiously, peace-time appeals for individuals to make some small sacrifice in the rate at which they increase their standard of living seem to be less effective than war-time appeals for individuals to lay down their lives.”

“Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name.”

“Each individual goes on for an unpredictable time. Unpredictable on any particular occasion, that is, but averaging the true value of the resource.”

“Even in apparently faithful monogamous species, the female may be wedded to a male’s territory rather than to him personally.”

“Even while the group is going slowly and inexorably downhill, selfish individuals prosper in the short term at the expense of altruists.”