Sam Harris quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Sam Harris

Sam Harris Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Sam Harris on Wise Famous Quotes.

We know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.

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

As a man believes, so he will act.

A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.

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.

Our public discourse appears permanently riven by conspiracy theories.

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

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

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

The only differences between a cult and a religion are the numbers of adherents and the degree to which they are marginalized by the rest of society.

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.

One thing each of us knows for certain is that reality vastly exceeds our awareness of it.

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

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

It's simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.

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

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

I think it [getting a gun] should be like getting a pilot's license. I think you should require training to get a license to have a gun.

A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

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

Fundamentalism is only a problem if the fundamentals are a problem

Let me assure you that my intent is not to offend or merely be provocative. I'm simply worried.

You have a voice in your head that keeps saying things...haven't you noticed.

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

Every lie is an assault on the autonomy of those we lie to.

You cannot take death for apostasy seriously and be working for peace.

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

Islam, at the moment, is the motherlode of bad ideas.

From my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings.

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

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

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

To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.

If premarital sex is a sin, who is the victim?

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

Each of us is looking for a path back to the present:

Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.

Knowing what a person believes on a certain subject is not identical to knowing how that person thinks.

I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

The only proof that it is like something to be you at this moment is the fact (obvious only to you) that it is like something to be you.

Britain has become a net exporter of Islamism and jihadism. My former Islamist group didn't exist in Pakistan until we exported it from Britain.

Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love

Christians ... expend more "moral" energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide.

The moment one begins thinking about morality in terms of well-being, it becomes remarkably easy to discern a moral hierarchy across human societies.

The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.

Witnessing the misadventures of supposedly enlightened adepts and their devotees can be depressing. But it can also be amusing.

If Jesus does come down out of the clouds like a superhero, Christianity will stand revealed as a science . That will be the science of Christianity.

You don't choose to choose what you choose in life!

The urge for retribution, therefore, seems to depend upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior. Despite

Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.

Despite our perennial bad behavior, our moral progress seems to me unmistakable.

Consciousness is the basis of both the examined and the unexamined life.

Principle #1: Avoid dangerous people and dangerous places. Principle #2: Do not defend your property. Principle #3: Respond immediately and escape.

Your principal concern appears to be that the creator of the universe will take offense at something people do while naked.

While missionaries do many noble things at great risk to themselves, their dogmatism still spreads ignorance and death.

There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life.

Thoughts themselves are not a problem, but being identified with thought is.

Although science may ultimately show us how to truly maximize human well-being, it may still fail to

The 2.5 billion seconds that make up the average human

How could this next thought define your subjectivity at all?

On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one's own advice.

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

If you're suffering, you're thinking.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment.

I'm the Ted Bundy of string theory.

The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.

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

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

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

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

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

Psychopaths tend to make exceptionally good eye contact.

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

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

To agree to keep a secret is to assume a burden

The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism.

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.

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

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

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

[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.

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

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

Ideas matter - and philosophy is the art of thinking about them rigorously. In my view, that should be done in as public a forum as possible.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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