“It’s a no win situation. It’s a mug’s game. The religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically without being rude. They play the hurt feelings card at every opportunity.”

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.

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.

Words are memes that can be pronounced.

I look around the world and see so many wonderful things that I love and enjoy and benefit from, whether it’s art or music or clothing or food and all the rest. And I’d like to add a little to that goodness.

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

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

There are no good reasons to believe in god.

AI makes philosophy honest.

Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible.

Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.

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.

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.

A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.

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

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.

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

The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.

I am not well qualified to criticize the theory of rational expectations and the efficient market hypothesis because as a market participant I considered them so unrealistic that I never bothered to study them.

I had already learned from more than a decade of political life that I was going to be criticized no matter what I did, so I might as well be criticized for something I wanted to do.

Their compliments should not define you and nor should their criticism break you.

I don’t really mind criticism in music or in shows and stuff like that at all. I mean, it doesn’t really worry me even if it’s like out of place. At least it’s relevant.

The ambitious are criticized by those that have given up.

Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics!

The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.