“No matter how smart you are, you’re smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.”

The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.

Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.

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

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.

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.

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.

Death is the easiest of all things after it, and the hardest of all things before it.

Good works, because they must be forgotten instantly, can never become part of the world; they come and go,leaving no trace. They truly are not of this world.

Tools and instruments which can ease the effort of labor considerably are themselves not a product of labor but of work; they do not belong in the process of consumption but are part and parcel of the world of use objects.

I hate luxury. I exercise moderation, It will be easy to forget your vision and purpose one you have fine clothes, fast horses and beautiful women. [In which case], you will be no better than a slave, and you will surely lose everything.

It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator burdened with all the contradictions in the world.

It is easier to put people in chains than to remove them if the chains bring prestige, said George Bernard Shaw.

Innocence is a splendid thing, only it has the misfortune not to keep very well and to be easily misled.

Whether it is easy or hard, never lose your focus as to where you want to go.