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.
Daniel DennettIt is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.
Daniel DennettPostmodernism, the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There are no truths, only interpretations' has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for 'conversations' in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.
Daniel DennettThe chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
Daniel DennettHuman freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species - us.
Daniel Dennett