Daniel Dennett Quotes

101 quotes in 1657 categories

• Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
• 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…
• The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
• The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for…
• Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
• Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently…
• In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.
• You don't get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the…
• If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have…
• I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.
• I should emphasize this, to keep well-meaning but misguided multiculturalists at bay: the theoretical entities in which these tribal people frankly believe — the gods…
• My faith in the expertise of physicists like Richard Feynman, for instance, permits me to endorse—and, if it comes to it, bet heavily on the…
• Those who feel guilty contemplating "betraying" the tradition they love by acknowledging their disapproval of elements within it should reflect on the fact that the…
• Isn't it true that whatever isn't determined by our genes must be determined by our environment? What else is there? There's Nature and there's Nurture.…
• We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be "informavores", epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an…
• What you can imagine depends on what you know.
• People are afraid of being more ignorant than their children―especially, apparantly, their daughters.
• Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.
• Is he a dread genetic determinist, or a dread environmental determinist? He is neither, of course, for both these species of bogeyman are as mythical…
• Words are memes that can be pronounced.

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