There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
DANIEL DENNETTThe haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.
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To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant — inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write.
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The best thing about saying thank goodness in place of thank God this that here really are lots of ways of repaying your debt of goodness – by setting to create more of it, for the benefit of those to come.
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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.
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The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died.
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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 question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.
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No matter how smart you are, you’re smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.
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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.
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Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
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Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
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The mind is the effect, not the cause.
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Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species – us.
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There is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude.
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The earth has grown a nervous system, and it’s us.
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In the beginning, there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing has so much as a function; there was no teleology in the world at all.
DANIEL DENNETT