Sam Harris Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Sam Harris quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

To treat others ethically is to act out of concern for their happiness and suffering. — Sam Harris

As a man believes, so he will act. — Sam Harris

There's no way to reconcile Islam with Christianity. This difference of opinion admits of compromise as much as a coin toss does. — Sam Harris

There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable. — Sam Harris

A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings. — Sam Harris

I want to maximize my happiness, but I am generally not moved to do what I believe will make me happier than I now am. — Sam Harris

Our public discourse appears permanently riven by conspiracy theories. — Sam Harris

But the reality of consciousness appears irreducible. Only consciousness can know itself - and directly, through first-person experience. — Sam Harris

Faith is like a pickpocket who loans a person his own money on generous terms. — Sam Harris

We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence. — Sam Harris

Theology is ignorance with wings. — Sam Harris

Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident. — Sam Harris

Spirituality must be distinguished from religion - because people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences. — Sam Harris

We are free to burn the Qur'an or any other book, and to criticize Muhammad or any other human being. Let no one forget it. — Sam Harris

Many truths about ourselves will be discovered in consciousness directly or not discovered at all. — Sam Harris

I have always believed that the light at the end of the tunnel is not an illusion; the illusion is the tunnel itself. — Sam Harris

Confusion and suffering may be our birthright, but wisdom and happiness are available. — Sam Harris

We need not come to the end of the path to experience the benefits of walking it. — Sam Harris

Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste: Everyone is potentially harmed by their spread. — Sam Harris

If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or He does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil. — Sam Harris

Lying is the royal road to chaos. As — Sam Harris

What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons. — Sam Harris

A wasteland of embarrassment and social upheaval can be neatly avoidedby following a single precept in life:
Do not lie — Sam Harris

Fundamentalism is only a problem if the fundamentals are a problem — Sam Harris

The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms. — Sam Harris

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. — Sam Harris

120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. — Sam Harris

We are not self-caused little gods. — Sam Harris

As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population. — Sam Harris

Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world. — Sam Harris

Islam, at the moment, is the motherlode of bad ideas. — Sam Harris

To not believe in God is to know that it falls to us to make the world a better place. — Sam Harris

Honesty is a gift we can give to others. It is also a source of power and an engine of simplicity. — Sam Harris

Consciousness is already free of everything that remotely resembles a self. — Sam Harris

The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It's really no more inflammatory than that. — Sam Harris

Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. — Sam Harris

If you are thinking without knowing you are thinking, you are confused about who and what you are. — Sam Harris

If one doesn't value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic? — Sam Harris

Happily, the benefits of training in meditation arrive long before mastery does. — Sam Harris

To speak truthfully is to accurately represent one's beliefs. But candor offers no assurance that one's beliefs about the world are true. — Sam Harris

If you just focus on the trees swaying outside the window without distraction, you will see your true face. — Sam Harris

The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer obscured. — Sam Harris

What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero. — Sam Harris

Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim Algebra, we will see tht there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality. — Sam Harris

The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors. — Sam Harris

God visits suffering on innocent people of scope and scale that would even embarrass the most ambitious psychopath — Sam Harris

Jesus Christ - who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens - can now be eaten in the form of a cracker — Sam Harris

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail. — Sam Harris

There is almost nothing more common than the belief that one is above average in intelligence, wisdom, honesty, etc. — Sam Harris

You can do what you decide to do - but you cannot decide what you will decide to do. — Sam Harris

Some beliefs are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them. — Sam Harris

Words like "God" and "Allah" must go the way of "Apollo" and "Baal," or they will unmake our world. — Sam Harris

[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions. — Sam Harris

Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures. — Sam Harris

Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance. — Sam Harris

Imagine a perfect neuroimaging device that would allow us to detect and interpret the subtlest changes in brain function. — Sam Harris

Peaceful, honest people have the right to be left alone. — Sam Harris

I'm the Ted Bundy of string theory. — Sam Harris

That's just not right," Sam muttered. "Claude needs to keep his pants on. — Charlaine Harris

Moderates want their faith respected. They don't want faith itself criticized, and yet faith itself is what is bringing us all this - this lunacy. — Sam Harris

No atrocity was ever committed because people were being too reasonable, too skeptical, or too independently minded. — Sam Harris

I love Sam Mendes. He's a fantastic director. — Naomie Harris

It should go without saying that these rival belief systems [Judaism, Islam, Christianity] are all equally uncontaminated by evidence. — Sam Harris

Some say while religious fundamentalists betray reason. Moderates betray faith and reason equally. -Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion(Documentary) — Sam Harris

Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion — Sam Harris

If you're suffering, you're thinking. — Sam Harris

The urge for retribution depends upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior. — Sam Harris

It is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world. — Sam Harris

This is how you play tennis without the net — Sam Harris

Christianity will only make a contribution to the future of Europe if it can prove that people like Sam Harris are wrong and that we can make peace. — Timothy Radcliffe

Are we unconscious during sleep or merely unable to remember what sleep is like? — Sam Harris

The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence. — Sam Harris

We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas — Sam Harris

Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction. — Sam Harris

You don't get anything worth getting by pretending to know things you don't know. — Sam Harris

Anyone familiar with my work knows that I am extremely critical of all religious faiths. — Sam Harris

A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything in a person's life. — Sam Harris

Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected. — Sam Harris

Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything. — Sam Harris

In my own case, the most inflammatory statements I have ever made are ones that I have written and remain willing to defend. — Sam Harris

These silences are lacerating. — Sam Harris

But the true discipline is to remain committed, throughout the whole of one's life, to waking up from the dream of the self. — Sam Harris

Why didn't I decide to drink a glass of juice? The thought never occurred to me. Am I free to do that which does not occur to me to do? Of course not. — Sam Harris

We are all prisoners of our thoughts. — Sam Harris

People have been cherry-picking the Bible for millennia to justify their every impulse, moral and otherwise. — Sam Harris

Dogma in science really is humiliating when it is recognized as dogma. — Sam Harris

Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment. — Sam Harris

Psychopaths tend to make exceptionally good eye contact. — Sam Harris

Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects. — Sam Harris

The freedom to think out loud on certain topics, without fear of being hounded into hiding or killed, has already been lost. — Sam Harris

You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. — Sam Harris

I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror. — Sam Harris

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. — Sam Harris

This is an empirical claim: Look closely enough at your own mind in the present moment, and you will discover that the self is an illusion. — Sam Harris

It is time we admitted that we are not at war with terrorism. We are at war with Islam. — Sam Harris

It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum. — Sam Harris

passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. — Sam Harris

Have you ever traveled, beyond all mere metaphors, to the Mountain of Shame and stayed for a thousand years? I do not recommend it. — Sam Harris

False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose. — Sam Harris

We are now in the 21st century: all books, including the Koran, should be fair game for flushing down the toilet without fear of violent reprisal. — Sam Harris