A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.
DANIEL DENNETTThe secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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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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If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.
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Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
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I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
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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.
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Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct.
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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.
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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.
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I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
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True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don’t have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense in order to do massively crazy things.
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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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The mind is the effect, not the cause.
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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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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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What you can imagine depends on what you know. Philosophers who know only philosophy consign themselves to a janitorial role in the great enterprises of exploration that are illuminating the mysteries of our lives.
DANIEL DENNETT