The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.
DANIEL DENNETTThanks 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.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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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.
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A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.
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True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.
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Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
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Words are memes that can be pronounced.
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Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
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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.
DANIEL DENNETT -
Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
DANIEL DENNETT -
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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The earth has grown a nervous system, and it’s us.
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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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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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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.
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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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What you can imagine depends on what you know.
DANIEL DENNETT






