Daniel Dennett quotes - page 4

Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God. (Daniel Dennett)
The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them - especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are. View quote
Daniel Dennett
Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush. View quote
Daniel Dennett
If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do. View quote
Daniel Dennett
A scholar is just a library's way of making another library. View quote
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. View quote
Daniel Dennett
Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter. View quote
Daniel Dennett
You can't get through seminary and come out believing in God! View quote
Daniel Dennett
A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being. View quote
Daniel Dennett
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. View quote
Daniel Dennett
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. (Daniel Dennett)
Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications. View quote
Daniel Dennett
Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition. View quote
Daniel Dennett
In 50 years - or 20 years, or 200 years - our current epistemic horizon (the Big Bang, roughly) may look as parochial as the horizon Newton had to settle for in his day, but no doubt there will still be good questions whose answers elude us. View quote
Daniel Dennett
People are afraid of being more ignorant than their children―especially, apparantly, their daughters. View quote
Daniel Dennett
Imagination is cheap as long as you don't have to worry about the details. View quote
Daniel Dennett
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. View quote
Daniel Dennett
...but I also can't prove that mushrooms could not be intergalactic spaceships spying on us. View quote
Daniel Dennett
If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by 'mere machines,' there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend. View quote
Daniel Dennett
We should get used to the idea that we'll probably never be able to find - and confirm - a good explanation of the ultimate origin of the universe, though I see no reason to believe that we can't press much further on this question than we have managed to date. View quote
Daniel Dennett
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. (Daniel Dennett)
There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory). View quote
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 backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why. View quote
Daniel Dennett
It is now quite clear that there is no single point in the brain where all information funnels in, and this fact has some far from obvious consequences. View quote
Daniel Dennett
The distinction between responsible moral agents and beings with diminished or no responsibility is coherent, real, and important. View quote
Daniel Dennett