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.
DANIEL DENNETTNot a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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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.
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There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.
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Cost is always an object – the second law of thermodynamics sees to that.
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The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
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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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Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
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The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.
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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.
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A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
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Go ahead and believe in God , if you like, but don’t imagine that you have been given any grounds for such a belief by science.
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There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.
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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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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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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.
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The mind is the effect, not the cause.
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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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I don’t think there is any religious revival. I think what we are hearing, the furor, is merely the hysterical response of the churches the handwriting on the wall that they are seeing.
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I’m the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.
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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 way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
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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.
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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.
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The earth has grown a nervous system, and it’s us.
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Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
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True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.
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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.
DANIEL DENNETT