Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
DANIEL DENNETTThe chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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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.
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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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Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.
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It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.
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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.
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It’s a no win situation. It’s a mug’s game. The religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically without being rude. They play the hurt feelings card at every opportunity.
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Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.
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I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
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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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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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The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
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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.
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Cost is always an object – the second law of thermodynamics sees to that.
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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 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 DENNETT