Daniel Dennett

The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable…

— Daniel Dennett

Natural selection is not gene centrist and nor is biology all about genes; our comprehending minds are a result of our fast…

— Daniel Dennett

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

— Daniel Dennett

I look around the world and see so many wonderful things that I love and enjoy and benefit from, whether it's art…

— Daniel Dennett

In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause…

— Daniel Dennett

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

— Daniel Dennett

I don't think there is any religious revival. I think what we are hearing, the furor, is merely the hysterical response of…

— Daniel Dennett

Go ahead and believe in God , if you like, but don't imagine that you have been given any grounds for such…

— Daniel Dennett

The point of asking questions is to find true answers; the point of measuring is to measure accurately; the point of making…

— Daniel Dennett

... there could be talking bunny rabbits, spiders who write English messages in their webs, and for that matter, melancholy choo-choo trains.…

— Daniel Dennett

It's this expandable capacity to represent reasons that we have that gives us a soul. But what's it made of? It's made…

— Daniel Dennett

An inert historical fact is any fact about a perfectly ordinary arrangement of matter in the world at some point in the…

— Daniel Dennett

When people ask me what philosophy is, I say philosophy is what you do when you don't know what the right questions…

— Daniel Dennett

Love is blind, as they say, and because love is blind, it often leads to tragedy: to conflicts in which one love…

— Daniel Dennett

Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again…

— Daniel Dennett

Highly technical philosophical arguments of the sort many philosophers favor are absent here. That is because I have a prior problem to…

— Daniel Dennett

The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes…

— Daniel Dennett

Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another…

— Daniel Dennett

Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them - if only to give you something…

— Daniel Dennett

We adore babies because they're so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. This is all…

— Daniel Dennett

As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely…

— Daniel Dennett

True, you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don't have to…

— Daniel Dennett

There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our…

— Daniel Dennett

Some cultural phenomena bear a striking resemblance to the cells of cell biology, actively preserving themselves in their social environments, finding the…

— Daniel Dennett

If the concept of consciousness were to fall to science, what would happen to our sense of moral agency and free will?…

— Daniel Dennett

Homunculi are bogeymen only if they duplicate entire the talents they are rung in to explain. If one can get a team…

— Daniel Dennett

Moreover, the eye contains a big flaw: the retina is inside out. Why would an almighty designer do such a thing? No…

— Daniel Dennett

While we tend to conceive of the operations of the mind as unified and transparent, they're actually chaotic and opaque. There's no…

— Daniel Dennett

Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the…

— Daniel Dennett

The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight…

— Daniel Dennett

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery... a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused.…

— Daniel Dennett

It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet. Guys go for girls like this because they are…

— Daniel Dennett

Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about - about what the issues really are - and so often it…

— Daniel Dennett

Whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain,…

— Daniel Dennett

I think that what one can see from a Darwinian account is how the addition of culture in our species turns us…

— Daniel Dennett

If I were to give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin for the…

— Daniel Dennett

For more than a century, people have often thought that the conclusion to draw from Darwin's vision is that Homo sapiens, our…

— Daniel Dennett

The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valery once put it. A mind is fundamentally an…

— Daniel Dennett

People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species - and they are right! We are…

— Daniel Dennett

In all mammalian species that have so far been carefully studied, the rate at which their members engage in the killing of…

— Daniel Dennett