Richard Dawkins

The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa….Leonardo had eye trouble….Art couldn’t explain it….But now we’re safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf…

He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages.

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

My reputation grows with every failure.

The first thing a great person does, is make us realize the insignificance of circumstance.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

The man who can make hard things easy is the educator.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but religiously follows the new.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t!

Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

When any calamity has been suffered the first thing to be remembered is, how much has been escaped.