Quotes by Daniel C. Dennett

“Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is...”

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

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

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

“Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.”

“Some years ago, there was a lovely philosopher of science and journalist in Italy named Giulio Giorello, and he did an interview with me. And I dont know if he wrote it or not, but the headline in ...”

“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...”

“My faith in the expertise of physicists like Richard Feynman, for instance, permits me to endorseand, if it comes to it, bet heavily on the truth ofa proposition that I don't understand. So far, my...”

“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 su...”

“If you want to teach your children that they are the tools of God, you had better not teach them that they are God's rifles, or we will have to stand firmly opposed to you: your doctrine has no glo...”

“One reader of an early draft of this chapter complained at this point, saying that by treating the hypothesis of God as just one more scientific hypothesis, to be evaluated by the standards of scie...”

“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...”

“That's a rhetorical question, and trying to answer rhetorical questions instead of being cowed by them is a good habit to cultivate.”

“I agree with Abhijit Naskar that the path of tolerance is the only waybut it must be accompanied by continued pressure to break down barriers to access to information, so that our tolerance isnt ex...”

“People are afraid of being more ignorant than their childrenespecially, apparantly, their daughters.”

“Words are memes that can be pronounced.”

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

“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 ignorantinexcusably ignorant, in a world where three o...”

“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.”

“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 w...”