Guy P. Harrison Quotes

Appreciate the magnificent brain you possess. Protect and nurture it. Strive to be a good skeptic and critical thinker so that fewer hours of your precious life will be squandered on dead-end beliefs. Always try to think like a scientist so that you might better know truth from fiction.

On the potential discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope: “Collectively, as a species, we are standing at the mouth of the deepest and darkest cave of all. As we lean in and turn on the flashlight, we can be confident that wonderful secrets await.”

Museums are my cathedrals. Artifacts in glass cases are my sacred relics. I truly believe I have felt something close to religious fervor inside some of these buildings. I even feel that I have experienced the occasional transcendent moment inside a museum.

The world's biggest problem is not sexism, racism, political polarization, war, or income inequality. The key never-ending crisis is that most people can't or won't think. Poor thinking skills cut cross all the usual lines to drag down societies like nothing else. Thinking well could alleviate or solve virtually all our problems.

In attempting to know, we engage in grand and meaningful acts. We use our human brains as time machines, to see and learn from the distant past and to travel forward thousands, millions, and billions of years. This young, patchwork organ that evolved to help ancient primates find food and water, maintain group relationships, achieve sexual intercourse, and imagine the next best tool now carries us to the very ends of the universe and beyond.

The solutions to human problems can only be found in humans. We need to get out of our own way and start acting like sensible sane lifeforms. … Yes, we have a terrible tendency to be shortsighted, greedy, violent, and irrational. But we also have a remarkable capacity for trust, cooperation, and figuring things out.

This is not how the 21st century was supposed to be going for us. As a child nurtured on Star Trek reruns, I imagined our species solving poverty, ending war, and colonizing other worlds by now. Silly me. Here I am today discussing a popular belief that reptilian extraterrestrials reside in Buckingham Palace.

Racism is an avoidable culture clash masquerading as inescapable biological warfare.

Humility is the key. If you are an arrogant, condescending skeptic then you are doing it wrong. Science and critical thinking rest upon a premise that says anyone can be wrong about anything. A good thinker is humble. We also must be mindful of the fact that very intelligent people can hold very dumb beliefs. It's a human condition. Irrational believers are not inferior people; they simply made a misstep somewhere along the way in their thinking.

Museums matter because they are invaluable points of collection and contemplation for a species with a complicated past and self-awareness issues. Somewhere in their wonderful mix of beauty, fact, fiction, lies, and error we discover crucial truths about us.

The basic understanding of evolution that I carry around in my head enhances my life. I've done night dives in the Caribbean, 130 feet down, and there were moments when I might have felt like an astronaut visiting some alien planet filled with exotic life. But I knew better. I was home and all the weird and wonderful lifeforms around me were family. The magnificence and importance of nature are clarified and amplified in light of the awareness of shared ancestors and a common origin. I understand that I'm inside the big beautiful blur of life that surrounds our world. And that makes the ride even more amazing.

You are not the sum of your Google searches, Amazon purchases, and Facebook likes. Your online activities should not define you as a person. But, increasingly, they do.

“We do not see the world. We watch internal movies about the world."

We all believe silly things. What matters is how silly and how many.

Find joy in existence. We live in good times. Now is somewhere between the beginning and the end of everything. . . . Collectively and individually, we must never stop exploring, imagining, experimenting, learning, and solving problems. This should not be difficult for any of us, because it is only human to do these things. This is who we are. It was the way of those remarkable Africans not so long ago in prehistory, and it can be your way now. The closer you look, the more you will see. The more you learn, the more alive and awake you will become.