Top 90 Daniel Dennett Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.”

— Daniel Dennett

2. “The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.”

— Daniel Dennett

3. “What you can imagine depends on what you know.”

— Daniel Dennett

4. “There are no good reasons to believe in god.”

— Daniel Dennett

5. “A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.”

— Daniel Dennett

6. “The earth has grown a nervous system, and it’s us.”

— Daniel Dennett

7. “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

8. “YES we have a soul but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.”

— Daniel Dennett

9. “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.”

— Daniel Dennett

10. “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

11. “Go ahead and believe in God, if you like, but don’t imagine that you have been given any grounds for such a belief by science.”

— Daniel Dennett

12. “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.”

— Daniel Dennett

13. “Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.”

— Daniel Dennett

14. “I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.”

— Daniel Dennett

15. “The mind is the effect, not the cause.”

— Daniel Dennett

16. “If nobody cares, then it doesn’t matter what happens to flowers.”

— Daniel Dennett

17. “The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.”

— Daniel Dennett

18. “Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down.”

— Daniel Dennett

19. “Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.”

— Daniel Dennett

20. “No matter how smart you are, you’re smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.”

— Daniel Dennett

21. “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

22. “The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.”

— Daniel Dennett

23. “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

24. “Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.”

— Daniel Dennett

25. “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

26. “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.”

— Daniel Dennett

27. “There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.”

— Daniel Dennett

28. “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.”

— Daniel Dennett

29. “Love is blind, as they say, and because love is blind, it often leads to tragedy: to conflicts in which one love is pitted against another love, and something has to give, with suffering guaranteed in any resolution.”

— Daniel Dennett

30. “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

31. “Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species – us.”

— Daniel Dennett

32. “Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.”

— Daniel Dennett

33. “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

34. “If the best the roboticists can hope for is the creation of some crude, cheesy, second-rate, artificial consciousness, they still win.”

— Daniel Dennett

35. “In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.”

— Daniel Dennett

36. “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

37. “People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species – and they are right! We are different. We are the only species that has an extra medium of design preservation and design communication: culture.”

— Daniel Dennett

38. “It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet. Guys go for girls like this because they are sexy. We adore babies because they’re so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why.”

— Daniel Dennett

39. “We should get used to the idea that we’ll probably never be able to find – and confirm – a good explanation of the ultimate origin of the universe, though I see no reason to believe that we can’t press much further on this question than we have managed to date.”

— Daniel Dennett

40. “The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.”

— Daniel Dennett

41. “A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.”

— Daniel Dennett

42. “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

43. “Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.”

— Daniel Dennett

44. “Cost is always an object – the second law of thermodynamics sees to that.”

— Daniel Dennett

45. “The best thing about saying thank goodness in place of thank God this that here really are lots of ways of repaying your debt of goodness – by setting to create more of it, for the benefit of those to come.”

— Daniel Dennett

46. “I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.”

— Daniel Dennett

47. “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

48. “Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently – the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs ‘good tricks.’”

— Daniel Dennett

49. “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.”

— Daniel Dennett

50. “I 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.”

— Daniel Dennett