“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.”

I’m the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.

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.

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.

The destruction of the inducement to invest by an excessive liquidity-preference was the outstanding evil, the prime impediment to the growth of wealth, in the ancient and medieval worlds.

We should not be flying a flag of a group who wants to erase our history and bring mass destruction to our country through Communism.

There is a great destructive force that comes upon us when we start comparing ourselves in the flesh with what we could be spiritually.

The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats.

I think what is needed in India today is the destruction of that defeatist spirit.

But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue – that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man’s destruction is finished.

While the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.