Top 40 Daniel C. Dennett Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

2. “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 C. Dennett

3. “Those who feel guilty contemplating “betraying” the tradition they love by acknowledging their disapproval of elements within it should reflect on the fact that the very tradition to which they are so loyal – the “eternal” tradition introduced to them in their youth – is in fact the evolved product of many adjustments firmly but delicately made by earlier lovers of the same tradition.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

4. “It is not “scientism” to concede the objectivity and precision of good science, any more than it is history worship to concede that Napoleon did once rule in’ France and the Holocaust actually happened. Those who fear the facts will forever try to discredit the fact-finders.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

5. “Neither Darwin nor Nietzsche was politically correct, fortunately for us.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

6. “Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. – Anonymous.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

7. “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

8. “Philosophy is to science what pigeons are to statues.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

9. “Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide. – Napoleon Bonaparte.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

10. “Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic.”

— 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. “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

13. “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

14. “As I have often noted, a wagon with spoked wheels doesn’t just carry grain or freight from place to place; it carries the brilliant idea of a wagon with spoked wheels. The.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

15. “Philosophy – in every field of inquiry – is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you should have been asking in the first place.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

16. “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

17. “The real danger, I think, is not that machines more intelligent than we are will usurp our role as captains of our destinies, but that we will over-estimate the comprehension of our latest thinking tools, prematurely ceding authority to them far beyond their competence.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

18. “One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance. You are normally oblivious of your own blind spot, and people are typically amazed to discover that we don’t see colors in our peripheral vision. It seems as if we do, but we don’t, as you can prove to yourself by wiggling colored cards at the edge of your vision – you’ll see motion just fine but not be able to identify the color of the moving thing.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

19. “Any theory that makes progress is bound to be initially counterintuitive.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

20. “Ancestor worship must be an appealing idea to those who are about to become ancestors. – Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story we tell others – and ourselves – about who we are.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

26. “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

27. “Anything that is usefully and voluminously predictable from the intentional stance is, by definition, an intentional system, and as we shall see, many fascinating and complicated things that don’t have brains or eyes or ears or hands, and hence really don’t have minds, are nevertheless intentional systems. Folk psychology’s basic trick, that is to say, has some bonus applications outside the world of human interactions.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

28. “We have all heard the forlorn refrain “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!” This phrase has come to stand for the rueful reflection of an idiot, a sign of stupidity, but in fact we should appreciate it as a pillar of wisdom. Any being, any agent, who can truly say, “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!” is standing on the threshold of brilliance. We.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

29. “Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve alone. – David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

30. “But as Descartes observed, even an infinitely powerful evil demon couldn’t trick him into thinking he himself existed if he didn’t exist: cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

31. “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

32. “The amount of information obtainable in short order by an inquisitive human being is staggeringly large.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

33. “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

34. “A good library has all the good books. A great library has all the books.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

35. “The politicians, the judges, the bankers, the industrialists, the journalists, the professors – the leaders of our society, in short – are much more like the average motorist than you might like to think: doing their local bit to steer their part of the whole contraption, while blissfully ignorant of the complexities on which the whole system depends.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “We have a better product than soap or automobiles. We have eternal life. – Reverend Jim Bakker8.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

40. “Don’t be afraid of a little metaphor; it won’t bite you, but you should always make sure you know how to cash it in for unvarnished fact when you feel the urge.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

41. “Ignorance is a necessary condition for many excellent things.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

42. “Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully set them behind you, and go on to the next big opportunity. But that is not enough: you should actively seek out opportunities to make grand mistakes, just so you can then recover from them.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

43. “The more you have invested in your religion, the more you will be motivated to protect that investment. Stark.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

44. “The Absolute Ignorance of evolution by natural selection is indeed capable of creating not just daisies and fish but also human beings who in turn have the competence to build cities and theories and poems and airplanes, and computers, which in turn could in principle achieve Artificial Intelligence with even higher levels of creative skill than their human creators.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

45. “Some philosophers can’t bear to say simple things, like “Suppose a dog bites a man.” They feel obliged instead to say, “Suppose a dog d bites a man m at time t,” thereby demonstrating their unshakable commitment to logical rigor, even though they don’t go on to manipulate any formulae involving d, m, and t.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

46. “I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound – if I can remember any of the damn things. – Dorothy Parker.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

47. “Asked by a student for an example of infectious cultural junk that is hard to eradicate, I replied, “Well, it’s like, when, like, you use a phrase which, like, isn’t really, like, doing any serious work, but, like you go on, like, using it.” To which the student replied, “I, like, understand the point, but I wanted, like, an example.”

— Daniel C. Dennett

48. “So Paley was right in saying not just that Design was a wonderful thing to explain, but also that Design took Intelligence. All he missed – and Darwin provided – was the idea that this Intelligence could be broken into bits so tiny and stupid that they didn’t count as intelligence at all, and then distributed through space and time in a gigantic, connected network of algorithmic process.”

— Daniel C. Dennett