Daniel Dennett Quotes

Concerning [postmodern] ideas, let us not mince words. The ideas are profoundly dangerous. They subvert our civilization by denying that truth is found by conscientious attempts accurately to portray a reality that exists independently of our perception or attitudes or other attributes such as race, ethnicity, sex or class.

There is no consensus, there is no homogeneity, there is no truth.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

I am someone who values truth - actual truth as opposed to "truthiness." I am also someone who has been trained in deconstruction in the literary theory department of Yale University, so I am someone who is tempted to believe that no absolute truth is possible.

There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.

Maybe I don't believe things myself, as well. Truth is such a transient thing.

There are many levels of truth.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism. Where modernism was about objectivity, postmodernism was about subjectivity. Where modernism sought a singular truth, postmodernism sought the multiplicity of truths.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

There was a time when meanings were focused and reality could be fixed; when that sort of belief disappeared, things became uncertain and open to interpretation.

I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.

Postmodernists believe that truth is myth, and myth, truth. This equation has its roots in pop psychology. The same people also believe that emotions are a form of reality. There used to be another name for this state of mind. It used to be called psychosis.

Nothing is proved, all is permitted.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.

I tried to take seriously the idea that if you tortured language you might arrive at some new truth. Later it became clear to me that I was retreading ground by fighting the literary battles of the 1950s and 1960s, and that I was actually a bit bored by some of the books I professed to love.

We have abandoned the claim to have a monopoly on the truth.

Facts are placed before reasonings and before ideals, even though the reasonings and the ideals be more beautiful, be seemingly more lofty, be seemingly better, be seemingly truer. The seemingly absurd and the seemingly impossible are sometimes true. The scientific disposition is to accept facts upon evidence, however absurd they may appear to our pre-conceptions.

We live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.

There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.

Liberation from meaning leaves us skeptical of truth itself, comfortable only to acknowledge 'your truth' and 'my truth,' confident only in the reality of subjective feeling rather than objective fact.

All faith is false, all faith is true. Truth is the shattered mirror strown in myriad bits, while each believes his little bit the whole to own.

A Sceptick therefore, who because he finds that Truths are not universally received, doubts of their existence, is just as foolish as a man who should try large shoes upon little feet, and little shoes upon large feet, and finding that they did not fit.

One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient.