Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
AI makes philosophy honest
The mind is the effect, not the cause.
Words are memes that can be pronounced.
There are no good reasons to believe in god.
What you can imagine depends on what you know.
The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us.
YES we have a soul but it's made of lots of tiny robots
A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.
You can't get through seminary and come out believing in God!
Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.
I think religion for many people is some sort of moral viagra.
True, you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.
If nobody cares, then it doesn't matter what happens to flowers.
Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.
We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn't admit it.
Cost is always an object - the second law of thermodynamics sees to that
The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.
Imagination is cheap as long as you don't have to worry about the details.
Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.
There is a time for politeness and there is a time when you are obliged to be rude.
Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died
Reasons for declaring belief is not are not the same as reasons for believing in god.
Most people in the West who say they believe in God actually believe in belief in God.
Atheism, a term which will, I'm sure, eventually become as unnecessary as round-earthism.
There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.
The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
There is no polite way to suggest to someone that they have devoted their life to a folly.
...but I also can't prove that mushrooms could not be intergalactic spaceships spying on us.
Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.
No matter how smart you are, you're smarter if you take the easy ways when they are available.
I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.
The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.
People are afraid of being more ignorant than their children―especially, apparantly, their daughters.
It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.
There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to all of us than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism.
There's no polite way to say to somebody (religious followers) 'Do you realize you've wasted your life?
If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.
Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
Religions have depended on the relative isolation and ignorance of their flocks, forever and this is all breaking down.
Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion!
Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.
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.
I'm the guy who reputedly denies that people experience colors or pains, and thinks that thermostats think — just ask my critics.
In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.
If the best the roboticists can hope for is the creation of some crude, cheesy, second-rate, artificial consciousness, they still win.
Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.
A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.