# Quote — Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

> Much of the controversy and anxiety that has enveloped Darwin's idea … can be understood as a series of failed campaigns to contain Darwin;s idea within some acceptably "safe" and merely partial revolution. Cede some or all of modern biology to Darwin, perhaps, but hold the line there! Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion! In these campaigns, many battles have been won by the forces of containment: flawed applications of Darwin's idea have been exposed and discredited, beaten back by the champions of the pre-Darwinian tradition. But new waves of Darwinian thinking keep coming.

- Author: [Daniel Dennett](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-dennett.md)
- Book: [Darwin's Dangerous Idea](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-dennett/darwins-dangerous-idea.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett#Darwin's_Dangerous_Idea_(1995)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-dennett/darwins-dangerous-idea/much-of-the

## More from this book

> If you have ever asked yourself if there are facts about yourself (about your health, your competence, your prospects) you would rather not know, and decided that there were, you should be prepared to consider seriously the suggestion that the best — perhaps the only — way to ensure that such facts are not imposed on people is by prohibiting investigations likely to discover them.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-dennett/darwins-dangerous-idea/if-you-have.md)

> Political correctness, in the extreme versions worthy of the name, is antithetical to almost all surprising advances in thought. We might call it eumemics, since it is, like the extreme eugenics of Social Darwinists, an attempt to impose myopically derived standards of safety and goodness on the bounty of nature. Few today — but there are a few — would brand all genetic counseling, all genetic policies, with the condemnatory title of eugenics.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-dennett/darwins-dangerous-idea/political-correctness-in-the.md)

> [T]he only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-dennett/darwins-dangerous-idea/t-he-only-meaning.md)