“True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don’t have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense in order to do massively crazy things.”

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.

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.

I can’t be normal. I’m probably bipolar.

The crazy ones only laugh when there is no reason to laugh.

It is not like I have gone crazy, I just don’t want to take any chances. You never know what could happen.

Only the strong go crazy. The weak just go along.

Smart people seem like crazy people to dumb people.

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy. Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.

The world may be broken, but hope is not crazy.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.