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.
DANIEL DENNETTI don’t think there is any religious revival. I think what we are hearing, the furor, is merely the hysterical response of the churches the handwriting on the wall that they are seeing.
More Daniel Dennett Quotes
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The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died.
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The mind is the effect, not the cause.
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I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
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Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
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You can’t get through seminary and come out believing in God!
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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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There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.
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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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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.
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What you can imagine depends on what you know.
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There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.
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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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Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
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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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There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
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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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Sometimes 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.
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Words are memes that can be pronounced.
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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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There is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude.
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Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.
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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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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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Cost is always an object – the second law of thermodynamics sees to that.
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The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
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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.
DANIEL DENNETT