Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Sam Harris
Sam Harris Quotes
133 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
The feeling that we call "I" seems to define our point of view in every moment, and it also provides an anchor for popular beliefs about souls and freedom of will. And yet this feeling, however imperturbable it may appear at present, can be altered, interrupted, or entirely abolished.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
As a general matter, I believe we should be very slow to make conclusions about the nature of the cosmos based upon inner experience – no matter how profound these experiences seem.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
The Bible … does not contain a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or woman living in the first century.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
The illusion of free will... is itself an illusion. There is no illusion of free will. Thoughts and intentions simply arise. What else could they do? Now, some of you might think this sounds depressing, but it's actually incredibly freeing to see life this way. It does take something away from life: what it takes away from life is an egocentric view of life. We're not truly separate: we are linked to one another, we are linked to the world, we are linked to our past, and to history. And what we do actually matters because of that linkage, because of the permeability, because of the fact that we can't be the true locus of responsibility. That's what makes it all matter.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
Some researchers have speculated that religion itself may have played an important role in getting large groups of prehistoric humans to socially cohere. If this is true, we can say that religion has served an important purpose. This does not suggest, however, that it serves an important purpose now. There is, after all, nothing more natural than rape. But no one would argue that rape is good, or compatible with a civil society, because it may have had evolutionary advantages for our ancestors. That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
I've read the books. God is not a moderate. There's no place in the books where God says, "You know, when you get to the New World and you develop your three branches of government and you have a civil society, you can just jettison all the barbarism I recommended in the first books."
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
The treatment of women in Muslim communities throughout the world is unconscionable.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
As a source of objective morality, the Bible is one of the worst books we have. It might be the very worst, in fact—if we didn't also happen to have the Qur'an.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced. In a world that has long been terrorized by fratricidal Sky-God religions, the ascendance of Buddhism would surely be a welcome development.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
When considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn't. Religion is one area of our lives where people imagine that some other standard of intellectual integrity applies.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
Your life doesn't get any better than your mind is: You might have wonderful friends, perfect health, a great career, and everything else you want, and you can still be miserable. The converse is also true: There are people who basically have nothing—who live in circumstances that you and I would do more or less anything to avoid—who are happier than we tend to be because of the character of their minds. Unfortunately, one glimpse of this truth is never enough. We have to be continually reminded of it.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: "Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being." Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say that I would have lived in a different universe had I been in a different universe.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
You are not in control of your mind—because you, as a conscious agent, are only part of your mind, living at the mercy of other parts.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a thelogically defensible reading of the Bible.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific notions of martyrdom and jihad that fully explain the character of Muslim violence.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
You are either lucky in this department or you aren't—and you cannot make your own luck.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.
Sam Harris
Source
Report...
There must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.
Sam Harris
1
2
3
4
5
6
Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Sam Harris
Creative Commons
Born:
April 9, 1967
(age 57)
Bio:
Samuel Benjamin "Sam" Harris is an American author, philosopher, and neuroscientist.
Known for:
Waking Up (2014)
The End of Faith (2004)
The Moral Landscape (2010)
Free Will (2012)
Letter to a Christian Nation (2006)
Most used words:
people
human
life
illusion
religious
god
moment
religion
sense
fact
problem
faith
reasons
beliefs
evidence
Sam Harris on Wikipedia
Sam Harris on Twitter
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Sam Harris Quotes
Sam Harris Short Quotes
American Neuroscientist Quotes
Neuroscientist Quotes
20th-century Neuroscientist Quotes
Related People
Richard Dawkins
English Biologist
Christopher Hitchens
American Journalist
Daniel Dennett
American Philosopher
Maajid Nawaz
British Activist
Dave Rubin
American Comedian
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes