178 Quotes by Daniel Dennett

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.

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.

The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died

We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn't admit it.

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

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.

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.

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

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