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.
DANIEL DENNETTYou 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.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
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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.
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A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
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The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died.
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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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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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There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
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The earth has grown a nervous system, and it’s us.
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What you can imagine depends on what you know.
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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.
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True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.
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There’s no polite way to say to somebody (religious followers) ‘Do you realize you’ve wasted your life?
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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.
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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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The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable for the disasters is a transparently disingenuous innovation of the theologians.
DANIEL DENNETT






