Daniel Dennett quotes

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Mistake #Chiefs #Tricks

If I were to give a prize for the single best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin for the idea of natural selection - ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein - because his idea unites the two most disparate features of our universe: the world of purposeless, meaningless matter and motion, particles jostling on the one side, and the world of meaning and purpose, design on the other.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Ideas #Two #Giving

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.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Atheist #Atheism #Doe

The traditional view of purpose says it comes from on high, from God, from the Creator. Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition. Whereas people used to think of meaning coming from on high and being ordained from the top down, now we have Darwin saying, "No, all of this design can happen, all of this purpose can emerge from the bottom up without any direction at all."
-- Daniel Dennett

#Thinking #Views #Ideas

To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant—inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Writing #People #Doubt

For more than a century, people have often thought that the conclusion to draw from Darwin's vision is that Homo sapiens, our species - and we're just animals too, we're just mammals - that there is nothing morally special about us. I myself don't think this follows at all from Darwin's vision, but it is certainly the received view in many quarters.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Animal #Thinking #Views

The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Motivation #Inspiration #Secret

I think that what one can see from a Darwinian account is how the addition of culture in our species turns us into a very special sort of animal, an animal that can be a moral agent in a way that no other animal can be.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Thinking #Animal #Special

If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Beauty #Attitude #Humble

After Darwin, God's role changes from being the designer of all creatures great and small to being the designer of the laws of nature, from which natural selection can unfold, to being perhaps just the chooser of the laws. By the time God's role has been so diminished, he becomes a bit like a constitutional monarch, presiding ceremonially but not having any more work to do. That's a place for God if it makes people comfortable to keep God as the presider over the universe. I suppose that is satisfying for many.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Law #People #Roles

I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Thinking #People #Viagra

I don't myself need that role for God. My view is that creation itself, the universe itself, is the most wonderful thing deserving awe and respect. And that satisfies me as my substitute for God.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Views #Needs #Roles

I am confident that those who believe in belief are wrong. That is, we no more need to preserve the myth of God in order to preserve a just and stable society than we needed to cling to the Gold Standard to keep our currency sound. It was a useful crutch, but we've outgrown it. Denmark, according to a recent study, is the sanest, healthiest, happiest, most crime-free nation in the world, and by and large the Danes simply ignore the God issue. We should certainly hope that those who believe in belief are wrong, because belief is waning fast, and the props are beginning to buckle.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Faith #Believe #Issues

There is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude,
-- Daniel Dennett

#Rude #Politeness

I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough.
-- Daniel Dennett

#People #Asking #Way

Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of even Newton or Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. It is not just a wonderful idea. It is a dangerous idea.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Space #Awards #Law

Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners...
-- Daniel Dennett

#Life #Spring #Perspective

There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Religion #Atheism #Force

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Ideas #People #Tradition

We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be "informavores", epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Decision #World #Quests

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.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Art #Atheist #Add

The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Earth #Nervous #Nervous System

The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died
-- Daniel Dennett

#Alternatives #Answers #Economics

In order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. All the works of human genius can be understood in the end to be products of a cascade of generate-and-test procedures that are, at bottom, algorithmic and mindless
-- Daniel Dennett

#Beautiful #Order #Perfect

The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it!
-- Daniel Dennett

#Home #Rocks #Sea

There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Philosophy #Philosophical #Humility

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.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Consciousness #More Time

I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Thinking #People #Roles

What you can imagine depends on what you know.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Inspirational #Imagine

Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Believe #People #Atheism

Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Life #Coats #Paint

Words are memes that can be pronounced.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Memes

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them - especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Art #Mistake #Mind

There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).
-- Daniel Dennett

#Memories #Independent #Reality

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.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Talking #Issues #Long

Cults and prophets proclaiming the imminent end of the world have been with us for several millenia, and it has been another sour sort of fun to ridicule them the morning after, when they discover that their calculations were a little off. But, just as with Marxists, there are some among them who are working hard to 'hasten the inevitable,' not merely anticipating the End Days with joy in their hearts, but taking political action to bring about the conditions they think are the prerequisites for that occasion.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Morning #Fun #Heart

There's no polite way to say to somebody (religious followers) 'Do you realize you've wasted your life?
-- Daniel Dennett

#Religious #Atheism #Followers

In fact, if you are faced with the prospect of running across an open field in which lightning bolts are going to be a problem, you are much better off if their timing and location are determined by something, since then they may be predictable by you, and hence avoidable. Determinism is the friend, not the foe, of those who dislike inevitability.
-- Daniel Dennett

#Running #Facts #Lightning