Daniel Dennett Quotes

For the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication.

The world moves into the future as a result of decisions, not as a result of plans. Plans are significant only insofar as they affect decisions.

The day you make a decision about your life is the day your world will change.

It's impossible for us to forecast what's going to happen ten years from now and make a decision today to say what we're going to do.

If I wanted to doubt, then I could doubt endlessly, but at some point a person has to stop questioning and act, and at that point you have to trust something to be true. You have to act as if something is true, and so you choose the thing you have the most reason to believe in, you have to live in the world that you have the most hope in.

Organize first for knowledge, first with the object of making us know ourselves as a nation, for we have to do that before we canbe of value to other nations of the world and then organize to accomplish the things that you decide to want. Anddon't make decisions with the interest of youth alone before you. Make your decisions because they are good for the nation as a whole.

Decisions are made by those who show up. Don't ever forget that you're a citizen of this world.

The failure of market catallactics in no way denies the following truth: given sufficient knowledge the optimal decisions can always be found by scanning over all the attainable states of the world and selecting the one which according to the postulated ethical welfare function is best. The solution 'exists'; the problem is how to 'find' it.

My focus, my life, my world is now. You just can't plan the future.

Nobody in the world is as good at making decisions as the Japanese.

I like a world where each of us has the tools to be able to make able to make our own decisions.

Nothing that matters in this world happens unless leaders lead it.

The fate of the universe is a decision yet to be made, one which we will intelligently consider when the time is right.

People in this world are not often logical.

There is no corporation in the world that would, in a competitive environment, try and concentrate all decisions at the corporate level.

Existence permeates sexuality and vice versa, so that it is impossible to determine, in a given decision or action, the proportion of sexual to other motivations, impossible to label a decision or act ‘sexual’ or ‘non-sexual’ . There is no outstripping of sexuality any more than there is sexuality enclosed within itself. No one is saved and no one is totally lost.

Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts.

Never feel guilty. Don't hold yourself back by guilt or fear. No other species in the entire world deals with guilt. Guilt is a bizarre emotion that makes you feel bad about decisions that you make.

Sometimes in this world you make unpopular decisions because you think they're right.

In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.

Sometimes we make decisions about our life and they feel like the right decision at the time. No, they are the right decision at the time. But that doesn't mean they'll be the right decision forever.

I shall attempt to prove two things: first, that the actions and dispositions of mankind are the offspring of circumstances and events, and not of any original determination that they bring into the world; and, secondly, that the great stream of our voluntary actions essentially depends, not upon the direct and immediate impulses of sense, but upon the decisions of the understanding.

She squinted up at him. "But I haven't always made good decisions." Pastor Harris smiled. "All that shows is that you're human.

We overreached our decision power. Sometimes our decisions have to fit the reality of the outside world.

I guess the idea of not wanting to choose to direct a film, for which I've not read a script. It's a tough decision to make without seeing any pages. That's not to say that I don't have all the faith in the world in the spectacular writers.