Richard Dawkins Quotes

If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers.

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

We owe it to our kids to inform them and train them how to think, not what to think.

The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them.

The proper business of a University is ... not to tell us ... what we ought to believe, and make us accept the belief as a duty; but to give us information and training, and help us to form our own beliefs in a manner worthy of intelligent beings.

My dad instilled in me to naturally question all authority. I don't follow anything blindly. That's religion, cops, doctors, schools, you name it.

When you give your children knowledge, you are telling them what to think. When you give your children wisdom, you do not tell them what to know, or what is true, but rather, how to get to their own truth.

By freethinking I mean the use of the understanding in endeavoring to find out the meaning of any proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature of the evidence for or against, and in judging of it according to the seeming force or weakness of the evidence.

When schools produce students who learned to think on the left or on the right, they're not thinking for themselves.

One of the most important things one can do in life is to brutally question every single thing you are taught.

I've always been very liberal when it comes to people thinking for themselves.

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

He who dares not reason, is a slave.

The philosophical spirit is not satisfied to simply accept what it is told, no matter how much prestige the teller seems to have. This is true even if the teller is a god.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

If we would guide by the light of reason we must let our minds be bold.

Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.

All of my friends are independent in thought, that's important.

Be an atheist if you want, but do not believe in anything unquestioningly.

Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

Embrace truth as it is revealed to-day by human reason.

I had always been scrupulously careful to avoid the smallest suggestion of infant indoctrination, which I think is ultimately responsible for much of the evil in the world. Others, less close to her, showed no such scruples, which upset me, as I very much wanted her, as I want all children, to make up her own mind freely when she became old enough to do so. I would encourage her to think, without telling her what to think.

Most Christians are afraid that people will think for themselves; most atheists are afraid that they won’t.

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.

Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce.