178 Quotes by Daniel Dennett

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.

A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.

I look around the world and see so many wonderful things that I love and enjoy and benefit from, whether it’s art or music or clothing or food and all the rest. And I’d like to add a little to that goodness.

It’s a no win situation. It’s a mug’s game. The religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically without being rude. They play the hurt feelings card at every opportunity.

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

Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently – the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs ‘good tricks.’

Go ahead and believe in God, if you like, but don’t imagine that you have been given any grounds for such a belief by science.

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.

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