We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.
DANIEL DENNETTSometimes 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.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species – us.
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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.
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You can’t get through seminary and come out believing in God!
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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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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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The mind is the effect, not the cause.
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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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The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.
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In the beginning, there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing has so much as a function; there was no teleology in the world at all.
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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.
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I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
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A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
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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.
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No matter how smart you are, you’re smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.
DANIEL DENNETT