Daniel Dennett Quotes

The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.

The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable for the disasters is a transparently disingenuous innovation of the theologians.

Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.

There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.

What you can imagine depends on what you know.

There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.

There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.

There is no polite way to suggest to someone that they have devoted their life to a folly.

No matter how smart you are, you're smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.

Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.

We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.

Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down.

I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.

The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us.

True, you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don't have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense in order to do massively crazy things.

There are no good reasons to believe in god.

The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.

The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.

Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.

There's no polite way to say to somebody (religious followers) 'Do you realize you've wasted your life?

Thanks to technology, what almost anybody can do has been multiplied a thousandfold, and our moral understanding about what we ought to do hasn't kept pace.

There is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude.

There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.

The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died

The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.

We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn't admit it.

YES we have a soul but it's made of lots of tiny robots

In the beginning, there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing has so much as a function; there was no teleology in the world at all.

I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.

It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

In short, we need to recover the courage we celebrate in our heroes, and in particular, the courage to tolerate, for the sake of a free society, a level of risk we hardly ever imagined in the past.

I am inclined to think that nothing could matter more than what people love. At any rate, I can think of no value that I would place higher. I would not want to live in a world without love.

As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely to do something really stupid and self-destructive.

Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare.

How good are the best musical imaginations? Can a trained musician, swiftly reading a score tell just how that voicing of dissonant oboes and flutes over the massed strings will sound?

Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.

The mind is the effect, not the cause.

True, you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.

Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct.

AI makes philosophy honest

Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them - if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix.

Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species - us.

I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe.

The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.