Sam Harris Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings 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.
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.
But the reality of consciousness appears irreducible. Only consciousness can know itself - and directly, through first-person experience.
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.
I have always believed that the light at the end of the tunnel is not an illusion; the illusion is the tunnel itself.
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.
What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.
120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.
From my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings.
The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It's really no more inflammatory than that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Although science may ultimately show us how to truly maximize human well-being, it may still fail to
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
The freedom to think out loud on certain topics, without fear of being hounded into hiding or killed, has already been lost.
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 that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
Some say while religious fundamentalists betray reason. Moderates betray faith and reason equally. -Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion(Documentary)
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?
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.
[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.
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.
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.