American - Philosopher | March 28, 1942 -
The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it!
Daniel Dennett
LifeHomeSeaBrainNervousRock
The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
LifeHappinessYouFindImportant
We adore babies because they're so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why.
FunnyCuteWhyBackwardsJokesUs
A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.
AloneEmpathyChildDesertLanguage
Some cultural phenomena bear a striking resemblance to the cells of cell biology, actively preserving themselves in their social environments, finding the nutrients they need and fending off the causes of their dissolution.
FindingBiologyBearNeedCellsOff
In short, we need to recover the courage we celebrate in our heroes, and in particular, the courage to tolerate, for the sake of a free society, a level of risk we hardly ever imagined in the past.
CouragePastCelebrateSocietyFree
Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species - us.
FreedomIllusionHumanUsOnly
The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.
ScienceMathematicsProblemEthical
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.
GoodFutureScienceHistoryMind
I don't think the 9/11 attacks taught us anything we didn't already know about religion. It has long been obvious - even to the deeply religious - that religious fanaticism is an extremely dangerous deranger of otherwise sane and goodhearted people.
ReligionPeopleThinkLongDangerous
Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
PeopleDirectionUncomfortableIdea
I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe.
PeopleThinkUniverseThings Happen
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Daniel Dennett quotes