Sam Harris Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Hi Paquita, I think that old devil Sam Harris has slipped one by you.

Kurt Keefner

#3. Sam Harris made that great analogy. He said, 'If someone was talking into their hair dryer and claiming that they were speaking to God, they would call Bellevue. But, take away the hair dryer, it's just praying.'

Bill Maher

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

Sam Harris

#5. 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

#6. If you're suffering, you're thinking.

Sam Harris

#7. Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education.

Sam Harris

#8. My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own. That's not to say that all religious people are lunatics or idiots. It's anything but that.

Sam Harris

#9. If your golf instructor were to insist that you shave your head, sleep no more than four hours each night, renounce sex, and subsist on a diet of raw vegetables, you would find a new golf instructor. However, when gurus make demands of this kind, many of their students simply do as directed.

Sam Harris

#10. In Islam, it is the "moderate" who is left to split hairs,
because the basic thrust of the doctrine is undeniable: convert, sub-
jugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and conquer the world.

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#12. On some occasions the only people making accurate claims about the motivations of Islamists and jihadists are themselves dangerous bigots. That's terrifying.

Sam Harris

#13. Most seem to think that while a person may not be responsible for the opportunities he gets in life, each is entirely responsible for what he makes of these opportunities.

Sam Harris

#14. I would challenge anyone here to think of a questions upon which we once had a scientific answer, however inadequate, but for which now the best answer is a religious one.

Sam Harris

#15. 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

#16. In the best case, notions of God's love and grace provide some relief - but the central message of these faiths is that each of us is separate from, and in relationship to, a divine authority who will punish anyone who harbors the slightest doubt about His supremacy.

Sam Harris

#17. As manuals for contemplative understanding, the Bible and the Koran are worse than useless. Whatever wisdom can be found in their pages is never best found there, and it is subverted, time and again, by ancient savagery and superstition.

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#19. 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.

Sam Harris

#20. One of the great responsibilities we have as a society is to educate ourselves, along with the next generation, about which substances are worth ingesting, and for what purpose, and which are not.

Sam Harris

#21. cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know - it just happens.

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#25. Sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual understanding - these and other sources of moral wealth are destroyed the moment we deliberately misrepresent our beliefs, whether or not our lies are ever discovered.

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#27. Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything.

Sam Harris

#28. The paradox is that we can become wiser and more compassionate and live more fulfilling lives by refusing to be who we have tended to be in the past. But we must also relax, accepting things as they are in the present, as we strive to change ourselves.

Sam Harris

#29. 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

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

Sam Harris

#31. When you are able to rest naturally, merely witnessing the totality of experience, and thoughts themselves are left to arise and vanish as they will, you can recognize that consciousness is intrinsically undivided.

Sam Harris

#32. 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

#33. In the East, especially in contemplative traditions like those of Buddhism, being distracted by thought is understood to be the very wellspring of human suffering.

Sam Harris

#34. 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

#35. How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can't.

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#37. Despite how impressive many of my teachers were, they were undoubtedly human and susceptible to the same cultural biases and physical infirmities that define the lives of ordinary people.

Sam Harris

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. How could this next thought define your subjectivity at all?

Sam Harris

#41. 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

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

Sam Harris

#43. Given the link between belief and action, it is clear that we can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene.

Sam Harris

#44. Religious moderation is the direct result of taking scripture less and less seriously. So why not take it less seriously still? Why not admit the the Bible is merely a collection of imperfect books written by highly fallible human beings.

Sam Harris

#45. Unfortunately, failure enjoys a natural advantage. Wrong answers to any problem outnumber right ones by a wide margin, and it seems that it will always be easier to break things than to fix them.

Sam Harris

#46. 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.

Sam Harris

#47. One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.

Sam Harris

#48. We are all prisoners of our thoughts.

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#56. Clearly, one of the great tasks of civilization is to create cultural mechanisms that protect us from the moment-to-moment failures of our ethical intuitions.

Sam Harris

#57. Some pleasures are intrinsically ethical - feelings like love, gratitude, devotion, and compassion. To inhabit these states of mind is, by definition, to be brought into alignment with others.

Sam Harris

#58. The doors leading out of the prison of scriptural literalism simply do not open from the inside.

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#60. If pain were all that mattered, it would be as important to protect the rabbits from the foxes as to protect the Jews from the Nazis."16

Sam Harris

#61. 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

#62. It is still fashionable to believe that how you organize yourself religiously in this life may matter for eternity. Unless we can erode the prestige of that kind of thinking, we're not going to be able to undermine these divisions in our world.

Sam Harris

#63. Primarily, that means learning to recognize thoughts as thoughts - as transient appearances in consciousness - and to no longer be distracted by them, if only for short periods of time.

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#65. You can't get enough of your favorite meal until, in the next moment, you find you are so stuffed as to nearly require the attention of a surgeon - and yet, by some quirk of physics, you still have room for dessert.

Sam Harris

#66. The 2.5 billion seconds that make up the average human

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#68. One of the problems with religion is that it creates in-group loyalty and out-group hostility, even when members of one's own group are behaving like psychopaths.

Sam Harris

#69. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas).

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#71. I think it would be extremely helpful if people focused on the ideas being discussed here, rather than on calling you names - which is an easy way to ignore your ideas.

Sam Harris

#72. 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

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

Sam Harris

#74. This is one of the things I find so insufferable about the liberal backlash against critics of Islam - especially the pernicious meme "Islamophobia," by which anyone who thinks Islam merits special concern at this moment in history is branded a bigot.

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#76. 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

#77. 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.

Sam Harris

#78. The perpetrators of the Inquisition - the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions - were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God - popes, bishops, friars, and priests.

Sam Harris

#79. 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

#80. Faith is the mortar that fills the cracks in the evidence and the gaps in the logic, and thus it is faith that keeps the whole terrible edifice of religious certainty still looming dangerously over our world.

Sam Harris

#81. 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

#82. A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny, and you might observe that you no more decide the next thought you think than the next thought I write.

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#84. 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.

Sam Harris

#85. 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

#86. Our system of justice should reflect an understanding that any of us could have been dealt a very different hand in life. In fact, it seems immoral not to recognize just how much luck is involved in morality itself.

Sam Harris

#87. It is time we recognized that the only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.

Sam Harris

#88. 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

#89. It is important to realize that our inability to answer a question says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer.

Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris

#91. We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.

Sam Harris

#92. George Bush says he speaks to god every day, & Christians love him for it. If George Bush said he spoke to god through his hair dryer, they would think he was mad. I fail to see how the addition of a hair dryer makes it any more absurd.

Sam Harris

#93. As human being, we live in a perpetual conversation between conversation and violence; what apart from fundamental willingness to be reasonable, can guarantee that we will keep talking to one another?

Sam Harris

#94. I didn't see what was in front of me until I thought it might be taken away. - Sam

Charlaine Harris

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

Sam Harris

#96. Maybe I felt like I'd come so close to forever-death that I'd better step back and take a look at my life. Maybe I didn't like a lot of what I'd done with it so far.

Charlaine Harris

#97. Honest people are a refuge: You know they mean what they say; you know they will not say one thing to your face and another behind your back; you know they will tell you when they think you have failed - and for this reason their praise cannot be mistaken for mere flattery.

Sam Harris

#98. 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

#99. If there is any kernel of truth in the religions we so deplore,and they are just a carnival of errors,the truth is that it's possible to sink into the present moment in such a way as to find it sacred and to cease to have a problem.

Sam Harris

#100. 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