Top 90 Daniel Dennett Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Natural selection is not gene centrist and nor is biology all about genes; our comprehending minds are a result of our fast evolving culture.”

— Daniel Dennett

52. “You can’t get through seminary and come out believing in God!”

— Daniel Dennett

53. “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

54. “Some cultural phenomena bear a striking resemblance to the cells of cell biology, actively preserving themselves in their social environments, finding the nutrients they need and fending off the causes of their dissolution.”

— Daniel Dennett

55. “True, you don’t have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.”

— Daniel Dennett

56. “Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, when you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully forget them and go on to the next big opportunity.”

— Daniel Dennett

57. “Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.”

— Daniel Dennett

58. “Reasons for declaring belief is not are not the same as reasons for believing in god.”

— Daniel Dennett

59. “Consciousness is cerebral celebrity – nothing more and nothing less. Those contents are conscious that persevere, that monopolize resources long enough to achieve certain typical and “symptomatic” effects – on memory, on the control of behavior and so forth.”

— Daniel Dennett

60. “Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.”

— Daniel Dennett

61. “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 Dennett

62. “The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.”

— Daniel Dennett

63. “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.”

— Daniel Dennett

64. “We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.”

— Daniel Dennett

65. “Words have a genealogy and it’s easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.”

— Daniel Dennett

66. “Words are memes that can be pronounced.”

— Daniel Dennett

67. “Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible.”

— Daniel Dennett

68. “The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.”

— Daniel Dennett

69. “Darwin’s idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.”

— Daniel Dennett

70. “Imagination is cheap as long as you don’t have to worry about the details.”

— Daniel Dennett

71. “Atheism, a term which will, I’m sure, eventually become as unnecessary as round-earthism...”

— Daniel Dennett

72. “It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.”

— Daniel Dennett

73. “In short, we need to recover the courage we celebrate in our heroes, and in particular, the courage to tolerate, for the sake of a free society, a level of risk we hardly ever imagined in the past.”

— Daniel Dennett

74. “I am inclined to think that nothing could matter more than what people love. At any rate, I can think of no value that I would place higher. I would not want to live in a world without love.”

— Daniel Dennett

75. “The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.”

— Daniel Dennett

76. “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.”

— Daniel Dennett

77. “An inert historical fact is any fact about a perfectly ordinary arrangement of matter in the world at some point in the past that is no longer discernible, a fact that has left no footprints at all in the world today.”

— Daniel Dennett

78. “Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion!”

— Daniel Dennett

79. “Homunculi are bogeymen only if they duplicate entire the talents they are rung in to explain. If one can get a team or committee of relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi to produce the intelligent behaviour of the whole, this is progress.”

— Daniel Dennett

80. “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.”

— Daniel Dennett

81. “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

82. “I’m the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think – just ask my critics.”

— Daniel Dennett

83. “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

84. “We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn’t admit it.”

— Daniel Dennett

85. “The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died.”

— Daniel Dennett

86. “Whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its member to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does!”

— Daniel Dennett

87. “I even agree that the concept of god helps some people lead better lives. That does happen. Don’t ever forget it. I just think there are better ways to help people lead better lives.”

— Daniel Dennett

88. “Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare.”

— Daniel Dennett

89. “People are afraid of being more ignorant than their children – especially, apparantly, their daughters.”

— Daniel Dennett

90. “How good are the best musical imaginations? Can a trained musician, swiftly reading a score, tell just how that voicing of dissonant oboes and flutes over the massed strings will sound?”

— Daniel Dennett