Sam Harris Quotes

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

Sam Harris

#2. The second commandment is "Thou shall not construct any graven images." Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity?

Sam Harris

#3. You don't choose to choose what you choose in life!

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#5. I don't think there's an interesting boundary between philosophy and science. Science is totally beholden to philosophy. There are philosophical assumptions in science and there's no way to get around that.

Sam Harris

#6. 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

#7. The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil's masterpiece.

Sam Harris

#8. A true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time, and that such ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the self.

Sam Harris

#9. 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

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

Sam Harris

#11. We are all prisoners of our thoughts.

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#15. What evidence could possibly be put forward to show that one could have acted differently in the past?

Sam Harris

#16. Muslims must learn that if they make belligerent and fanatical claims upon the tolerance of free societies, they will meet the limits of that tolerance.

Sam Harris

#17. We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That's it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper.

Sam Harris

#18. People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. The only thing we should respect in a person's faith is his desire for a better life in this world; we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next.

Sam Harris

#19. While religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction, it is still sheltered from criticism in every corner of our culture.

Sam Harris

#20. But our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for an hour, or perhaps a day, but then they subside.

Sam Harris

#21. The question of whether enlightenment is a permanent state need not detain us. The crucial point is that you can glimpse something about the nature of consciousness that will liberate you from suffering in the present.

Sam Harris

#22. Faith enables many of us to endure life's difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason.

Sam Harris

#23. It seems profoundly unlikely that our universe has been designed to reward individual primates for killing one another while believing in the divine origin of a specific book.

Sam Harris

#24. We might also wonder, in passing, which is more moral: helping people purely out of concern for their suffering, or helping them because you think the creator of the universe will reward you for it?

Sam Harris

#25. Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making.

Sam Harris

#26. An argument can be logically valid, but unsound in that it contains a false premise and, therefore, leads to a false conclusion (e.g., Scientists are smart; smart people do not make mistakes; therefore, scientists do not make mistakes).

Sam Harris

#27. 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.

Sam Harris

#28. Each increment of knowledge imparted in this way is so satisfying-and one's ignorance at every stage so consequential-that the process of learning BJJ can become remarkably addictive. I have never experienced anything quite like it.

Sam Harris

#29. Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu can experience - self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner light - constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs, because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another. A deeper principle must be at work.

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#31. When someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we're told that? God is mysterious.

Sam Harris

#32. Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment.

Sam Harris

#33. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves.

Sam Harris

#34. If we are in a position to affect the happiness or suffering of others, we have ethical responsibilities toward them2 - and many of these responsibilities are so grave as to become matters of civil and criminal law. Taking

Sam Harris

#35. I'm the Ted Bundy of string theory.

Sam Harris

#36. A total prohibition against lying is also ethically incoherent in anyone but a true pacifist.

Sam Harris

#37. My mind begins to seem like a video game: I can either play it intelligently, learning more in each round, or I can be killed in the same spot by the same monster, again and again.

Sam Harris

#38. Merely accepting that we are lazy, distracted, petty, easily provoked to anger, and inclined to waste our time in ways that we will later regret is not a path to happiness.

Sam Harris

#39. The United States government will not tolerate any disrespect for the holy Koran. What form our government's intolerance will take remains unspecified. I await a knock on the door.

Sam Harris

#40. Unlike the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the teachings of Buddhism are not considered by their adherents to be the product of infallible revelation. They are, rather, empirical instructions: If you do X, you will experience Y.

Sam Harris

#41. 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

#42. By lying, we deny others a view of the world as it is. Our dishonesty not only influences the choices they make, it often determines the choices they can make - and in ways we cannot always predict. Every lie is a direct assault upon the autonomy of those we lie to.

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#44. 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

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

Sam Harris

#46. It is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience.

Sam Harris

#47. We grasp at transitory pleasures. We brood about the past and worry about the future. We continually seek to prop up and defend an egoic self that doesn't exist.

Sam Harris

#48. God visits suffering on innocent people of scope and scale that would even embarrass the most ambitious psychopath

Sam Harris

#49. From the contemplative point of view, being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming. It's a mode of not knowing what is actually happening in the present moment. It is essentially a form of psychosis.

Sam Harris

#50. 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.

Sam Harris

#51. But what about love, compassion, moral goodness, and self-transcendence? Many people still imagine that religion is the true repository of these virtues. To change this, we must talk about the full range of human experience in a way that is as free of dogma as the best science already is.

Sam Harris

#52. The treatment of women in Muslim communities throughout the world is unconscionable. All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the Earth.

Sam Harris

#53. It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery: On the one hand, we can't make sense of it in scientific terms; on the other, we feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions.

Sam Harris

#54. The opportunity to decieve others is ever present and often tempting, and each instance of deception casts us onto some of the steepest ethical terrain we ever cross.

Sam Harris

#55. While the religious divisions in our world are self-evident, many people still imagine that religious conflict is always caused by a lack of education, by poverty, or by politics.

Sam Harris

#56. It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.

Sam Harris

#57. If you're constantly ruminating about what you just did- or what you should have done- or what you would have done if you only had the chance, you will miss your life. Ok, you will fail to connect with it. You will fail to connect with other people.

Sam Harris

#58. You almost never get the pleasure of seeing that you won the argument in real time. People just don't like to publicly change their minds. They change their minds in private.

Sam Harris

#59. The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.

Sam Harris

#60. Our habitual identification with thought - that is, our failure to recognize thoughts *as thoughts,* as appearances in consciousness - is a primary source of human suffering. It also gives rise to the illusion that a separate self is living inside one's head.

Sam Harris

#61. If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn't value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?

Sam Harris

#62. 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

#63. The fact that millions of people use the term "morality" as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.

Sam Harris

#64. The principal tenet of Jainism is non-harming. Observant Jains will literally not harm a fly. Fundamentalist Jainism and fundamentalist Islam do not have the same consequences, neither logically nor behaviorally.

Sam Harris

#65. In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise.

Sam Harris

#66. There seems to be no doubt that love and compassion are good, in that they connect us more deeply to others.30 Given this situation, we can see that one could desire to become more loving and compassionate for purely selfish reasons.

Sam Harris

#67. 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

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

Sam Harris

#69. While they rightly question every aspect of their "own" Western culture in the name of progress, they censure liberal Muslims who attempt to do so within Islam, and they choose to side instead with every regressive reactionary in the name of "cultural authenticity" and anticolonialism.

Sam Harris

#70. 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

#71. 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.

Sam Harris

#72. Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each.

Sam Harris

#73. If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have ... a recipe for the fall of civilization.

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#75. The U.S. Supreme Court has called free will a "universal and persistent" foundation for our system of law, distinct from "a deterministic view of human conduct that is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system" (United States v. Grayson, 1978).

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#77. Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.

Sam Harris

#78. The only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation.

Sam Harris

#79. 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

#80. Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds - and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe.

Sam Harris

#81. Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. It is time we recognized that this spirit of mutual inquiry, which is the foundation of all real science, is the very antithesis of religious faith.

Sam Harris

#82. Where we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we have lost both our connection to the world and to one another.

Sam Harris

#83. A person could, for instance, distinguish his bodily movements from those of another person without feeling a sense of self at all, for to do so merely requires that he distinguish one body (as an object) from another.

Sam Harris

#84. 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.

Sam Harris

#85. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious.

Sam Harris

#86. passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment.

Sam Harris

#87. Meditation ... puts into question more or less everything you tend to do in your search for happiness. But if you lose sight of this, it can become just another strategy for seeking happiness a more refined version of the problem you already have.

Sam Harris

#88. It makes no sense at all to have the most important features of our lives anchored to divisive claims about the unique sanctity of ancient books or to rumors of ancient miracles. There

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#90. Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance.

Sam Harris

#91. 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

#92. The truth is that most of our modern values are antithetical to the specific teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And where we do find these values expressed in our holy books, they are almost never best expressed there.

Sam Harris

#93. Subjective terms, you are consciousness itself - you are not the next, evanescent image or string of words that appears in your mind. Not seeing it arise, however, the next thought will seem to become what you are.

Sam Harris

#94. Consider what it would take to actually have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions, and you would need to have complete control over those factors.

Sam Harris

#95. Some ... sexist evil probably predates religion and can be ascribed to our biology, but there is no question that religion promulgates and renders sacrosanct attitudes toward women that would be unseemly in a brachiating ape.

Sam Harris

#96. 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

#97. Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.

Sam Harris

#98. Are we unconscious during sleep or merely unable to remember what sleep is like?

Sam Harris

#99. People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true. The more consequential the beliefs - that is, the more a person's well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or of other people's opinions - the more consequential the lie.

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris