Richard Dawkins

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones."

"An atheist before Darwin could have said, plausibly, that the visual marks of design in nature were evidence for a creator. But Darwin made a new kind of explanation possible."

"The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 5 billion years after universe began, is a fact."

"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence."

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

"Climbing Mount Improbable is hard, but it can be done without invoking the sky-hooks of supernaturalism."

"If there is a virus of the mind, what better name for it than religion?"

"Humans are primates, and primates are highly social creatures."

"The fact that we don't fully understand something doesn't mean we should stop trying to understand it."

"Consciousness is the most wonderful, the most magical phenomenon in the universe."

"We are the product of 4 billion years of evolution; there is no reason to expect that the effort required to understand us should be small."

"The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity."

"Science is the poetry of reality."

"Grow up and behave like the universe is the way it is, and stop saying it's the way you want it to be."

"Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science."

"There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning."

"The universe is just physics and chemistry and biology."

"We are each entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts."

"Do not allow the mind to be enslaved by the body."

"The most profound statement ever made about evolution is that it is a fact."

"Feeling, trust, and love are essential to our survival."

"We should abandon the practice of giving special credence to religious claims."

"Good design is invisible."

"The selfish gene theory has proven invaluable in explaining many aspects of evolution."

"If the word 'atheism' is not needed, there is no word for those who have merely failed to believe in god."

"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."

"The tragedy of our time is that we spend so much energy worrying about the afterlife that we forget to actually live."