It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.
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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Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
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The earth has grown a nervous system, and it’s us.
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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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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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Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
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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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Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.
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True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.
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Words are memes that can be pronounced.
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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.
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There are no good reasons to believe in god.
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The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died.
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There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
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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.
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The idea that God is a worthy recipient of our gratitude for the blessings of life but should not be held accountable for the disasters is a transparently disingenuous innovation of the theologians.
DANIEL DENNETT






