“The 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.”

Love is blind, as they say, and because love is blind, it often leads to tragedy: to conflicts in which one love is pitted against another love, and something has to give, with suffering guaranteed in any resolution.

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.

The mind is the effect, not the cause.

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.

The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died.

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

Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about – about what the issues really are – and so often it takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.

There is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude.

The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.

Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct.

What you can imagine depends on what you know. Philosophers who know only philosophy consign themselves to a janitorial role in the great enterprises of exploration that are illuminating the mysteries of our lives.

I think that what one can see from a Darwinian account is how the addition of culture in our species turns us into a very special sort of animal, an animal that can be a moral agent in a way that no other animal can be.

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.

We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be “informavores”, epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.

You can’t get through seminary and come out believing in God!

There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.

I like going from one lighted room to another, such is my brain to me; lighted rooms.

Sometimes a little brain damage can help.

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.