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

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

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

Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.

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

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

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.

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.

Some have brains, and some haven’t, and there it is.

We must take care of our minds because we cannot benefit from beauty when our brains are missing.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine.

Pictures, propagated by motion along the fibers of the optic nerves in the brain, are the cause of vision.

If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.

Invention is the most important product of man’s creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.

It is astonishing what an effort it seems to be for many people to put their brains definitely and systematically to work.

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.