39 Quotes by Daniel C. Dennett

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.

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

There is a general generous tendency to credit innovators with more prior comprehension than they actually deserve, and this helps perpetuate the myth of the Godlike powers of our famous geniuses, and by extension, to all of us.

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

One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance.

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

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.

I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough.

We Homo sapiens are the only species (so far) with richly cumulative culture, and the key ingredient of culture that makes this possible is language.