Top 29 Daniel C. Dennett Quotes
#2. I didn't plan to become an atheist. I didn't even want to become an atheist. It's just that I had no choice. If I'm being honest with myself.
Daniel C. Dennett
#3. human beings are actually more closely related to the two species of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes, the familiar chimp, and Pan paniscus, the rare, smaller pygmy chimp or bonobo) than those chimpanzees are to the other apes.
Daniel C. Dennett
#4. Ancestor worship must be an appealing idea to those who are about to become ancestors. - Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
Daniel C. Dennett
#5. Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve alone. - David Sloan Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral
Daniel C. Dennett
#7. Like many other natural wonders, the human mind is something of a bag of tricks, cobbled together over the eons by the foresightless process of evolution by natural selection.
Daniel C. Dennett
#8. That's a rhetorical question, and trying to answer rhetorical questions instead of being cowed by them is a good habit to cultivate.
Daniel C. Dennett
#9. Americans are notoriously ill-informed about evolution. A recent Gallup poll (June 1993) discovered that 47 percent of adult Americans believe that Homo sapiens is a species created by God less than ten thousand years ago.
Daniel C. Dennett
#10. As the comedian Emo Phillips once said, "When I was a child, I used to pray to God for a bicycle. But then I realized that God doesn't work in that way - so I stole a bike and prayed for forgiveness!
Daniel C. Dennett
#11. One cannot learn all about what it's like to run a marathon by interviewing only those who drop out - but one can learn something.
Daniel C. Dennett
#12. It turns out that all the "magic" of cognition depends, just as life itself does, on cycles within cycles of recurrent, "re-entrant," reflexive information-transformation processes
Daniel C. Dennett
#13. There is only one way to respect the substance of any purported God-given moral edict: consider it conscientiously in the full light of reason, using all the evidence at our command. No God that was pleased by displays of unreasoning love would be worthy of worship.
Daniel C. Dennett
#15. A good library has all the good books. A great library has all the books.
Daniel C. Dennett
#16. It's not an intellectual exercise. It's not an academic pursuit - it sort of masquerades as one, but at its core it's a test of trust in each other. Are you or aren't you one of us? And woe to the one who doesn't toe the line.
Daniel C. Dennett
#17. People who want to study religion usually have an ax to grind. They either want to defend their favorite religion from its critics or want to demonstrate the irrationality and futility of religion, and this tends to infect their methods with bias.
Daniel C. Dennett
#18. The more you have invested in your religion, the more you will be motivated to protect that investment. Stark
Daniel C. Dennett
#19. Science, however, is not just a matter of making mistakes, but of making mistakes in public. Making mistakes for all to see, in the hopes of getting the others to help with the corrections.
Daniel C. Dennett
#21. This is natural selection, plain as day: the islanders have a simple rule: if it returns from the sea intact, copy it! They may have considerable comprehension of the principles of naval architecture that retrospectively endorse their favorite designs, but it is strictly unnecessary.
Daniel C. Dennett
#22. I think we should stop treating ["God works in mysterious ways"] as any kind of wisdom and recognize it as the transparently defensive propaganda that it is. A positive response might be, "Oh good! I love a mystery. Let's see if we can solve this one, too. Do you have any ideas?
Daniel C. Dennett
#23. Carpenters don't make their saws and hammers, tailors don't make their scissors and needles, and plumbers don't make their wrenches, but blacksmiths can make their hammers, tongs, anvils, and chisels
Daniel C. Dennett
#24. I agree with Abhijit Naskar that the path of tolerance is the only way - but it must be accompanied by continued pressure to break down barriers to access to information, so that our tolerance isn't exploited to further the ends of totalitarian religious groups.
Daniel C. Dennett
#25. One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance.
Daniel C. Dennett
#27. Our manifest image, unlike the daisy's ontology or Umwelt, really is manifest, really is subjective in a strong sense. It's the world we live in, the world according to us.
Daniel C. Dennett
#28. You can't change your beliefs as an act of will, in the way you can decide to improve your skills with chainsaw or keyboard.
Daniel C. Dennett
#29. Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things - that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Daniel C. Dennett
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