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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

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Daniel Dennett
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 28
Cognitive Scientist
Philosopher
Professor
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Daniel Clement Dennett III
Daniel Clement Dennett
Religion
Lots
Place
Setting
Best
Debt
Come
Goodness
Thing
Benefits
Repaying
Really
Saying
Settings
Way
Ways
Benefit
Create
Thank

More quotes by Daniel Dennett

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In 50 years - or 20 years, or 200 years - our current epistemic horizon (the Big Bang, roughly) may look as parochial as the horizon Newton had to settle for in his day, but no doubt there will still be good questions whose answers elude us.
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Up till now, we can suppose, nervous systems solved the 'Now what do I do?' problem by a relatively simple balancing act between a strictly limited repertoire of actions - if not the famous four F's (fight, flee, feed, or mate), then a modest elaboration of them.
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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.
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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
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I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.
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Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
Daniel Dennett
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There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
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If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by 'mere machines,' there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend.
Daniel Dennett
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The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died
Daniel Dennett
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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.
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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
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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
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The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight - that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything [that] a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must either be turned into a symbol for something less concrete or abandoned altogether.
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Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about - about what the issues really are - and so often it takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.
Daniel Dennett
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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
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A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.
Daniel Dennett
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Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion!
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A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.
Daniel Dennett
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YES we have a soul but it's made of lots of tiny robots
Daniel Dennett
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Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
Daniel Dennett