Daniel Dennett Quotes

The earth is a fickle place for all life, not least the human project of civilization.

The planet will survive. Whether we get to be here and enjoy it, or enjoy life as we've known it, is what's questionable.

The transformation of environment has become the purpose of human life; life seems real only insofar as it deals with things.

The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.

We always have to remind ourselves of how fragile life on this planet is and what responsibilities we have.

There's eco-pragmatism, where you recognize, 'Yeah, we live on a planet that's permanently altered by humanity, and rather than seek to return to or preserve pure wilderness, we recognize that's an illusion, and we proceed under the new knowledge that we live, in fact, in a human-dominated planet.'

Can it be that there is not enough space for man in this beautiful world, under those immeasurable, starry heavens?

The fact is that no species has ever had such wholesale control over everything on earth, living or dead, as we now have. That lays upon us, whether we like it or not, an awesome responsibility. In our hands now lies not only our own future, but that of all other living creatures with whom we share the earth.

Remember that the sole life which a man can lose is that which he is living at the moment.

Nature holds no brief for the human experiment; it must stand or fall by its results.

The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events--that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies--and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.

The prospect of a world that contains neither humans nor Z's is not so terrifying. Nature will take its world back. Animals will frolic and fight. There will be no lord of the manor, which is not such a bad thing, because it seems to me that people have done a pretty poor job of guiding the biosphere for the last few thousand years.

Life is a disease; and the only difference between on man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives.

There is this thing called life. We live it, not as we intend or wish, but as we are driven on by forces outside and inside ourselves.

I want to challenge all of you as people of deep conscience, people who are environment stewards of the earth and oceans ... By changing what you eat, you will change the entire contract between the human species and the natural world.

Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - "God damn it, you've got to be kind."

Not all the winds, and storms, and earthquakes, and seas, and seasons of the world, have done so much to revolutionize the earth as Man, the power of an endless life, has done since the day he came forth upon it, and received dominion over it.

Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.

Today we understand that the future of humanity very much depends on our planet, and that the future of the planet very much depends on humanity.

Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself

Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic will that be?

People today have forgotten they're really just a part of nature. Yet, they destroy the nature on which our lives depend. They always think they can make something better... They don't know it, but they're losing nature. They don't see that they're going to perish. The most important things for human beings are clean air and clean water.

Nothing is so false as human life, nothing so treacherous. God knows no one would have accepted it as a gift, if it had not been given without our knowledge.

Nature is reminding us that it used to exist without human beings.