Richard Dawkins

British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator and author

I think the world's always a better place if people are filled with understanding.
I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine.
I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true.
Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say in public life. It is about saying that religion alone should not confer a privileged say in public life, or greater influence on it. It really is as simple as that.
Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.
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.
Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.
Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It's a sort of crime against childhood.
If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.
You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.