Sam Harris Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

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

  Sam Harris

  Beer, Years, Religion

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.17, W. W. Norton & Company

  30 Copy quote

• 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

  Integrity, Logical Arguments, People

  Sam Harris (2006). “Letter to a Christian Nation”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

  34 Copy quote

• You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.

  Sam Harris

  Storm, Lost

  Sam Harris (2012). “Free Will”, p.14, Simon and Schuster

  18 Copy quote

• The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not "cowards," as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith—perfect faith, as it turns out—and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.

  Sam Harris

  Men, Media, Perfect

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.67, W. W. Norton & Company

  38 Copy quote

• You can't take credit for your talents, but it matters that you use them. You can't really be blamed for your weaknesses, but it matters that you correct them. So pride and shame don't make a lot of sense, in the final analysis, but they weren't much fun anyway.

  Sam Harris

  Fun, Pride, Weakness

  22 Copy quote

• The core of science is not a mathematical modeling--it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.

  Sam Harris

  Honesty, Intellectual, World

  14 Copy quote

• Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain -- from cosmology to psychology to economics -- has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture. Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.

  Sam Harris

  Book, Our World, Self

  9 Copy quote

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

  Sam Harris

  Strong, Atheist, Atheism

  31 Copy quote

• Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Ignorance, Possibility

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.223, W. W. Norton & Company

  10 Copy quote

• We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Atheist, Civilization

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.45, W. W. Norton & Company

  29 Copy quote

• If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world.

  Sam Harris

  Atheist, Believe, Thinking

  22 Copy quote

• It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Atheist, Civilization

  15 Copy quote

• An average Christian, in an average church, listen to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse -- and there have been some extraordinary arrogant scientists.

  Sam Harris

  Christian, Sunday, Average

  7 Copy quote

• Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standard of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world.

  Sam Harris

  Spiritual, Creativity, Ignorance

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.21, W. W. Norton & Company

  48 Copy quote

• Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.

  Sam Harris

  Causes, Determined, Chance

  Sam Harris (2012). “Free Will”, p.5, Simon and Schuster

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Faith, People, Support

  Sam Harris (2006). “Letter to a Christian Nation”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

  8 Copy quote

• It's not so much religion per se, it's false certainty that worries me, and religion just has more than its fair share of false certainty or dogmatism. I'm really concerned when I see people pretending to know things they clearly cannot know.

  Sam Harris

  Worry, People, Pretending

  19 Copy quote

• It is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world.

  Sam Harris

  Christian, Our World, Pouring

  "On Non-Violent Islamic Extremism (1/3)" by Elham Manea, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 9, 2014.

  12 Copy quote

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

  Sam Harris

  Believe, People, May

  "The End of Faith". Book by Sam Harris, samharris.org. August 11, 2004.

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Past, Civilization, Religion

  Sam Harris (2006). “Letter to a Christian Nation”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

  7 Copy quote

• It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Hurricane Katrina struck shared your belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and compassionate God. But what was God doing while Katrina laid waste to their city? Surely He heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there.

  Sam Harris

  Prayer, Men, Elderly

  15 Copy quote

• About 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent deity.

  Sam Harris

  Believe, Book, Beer

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.17, W. W. Norton & Company

  17 Copy quote

• The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments , and a passionate unwillingness to do so.

  Sam Harris

  Differences, Passionate, Argument

  "Science Must Destroy Religion" by Sam Harris, en.wikiquote.org. January 02, 2006.

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Christian, Morality, Physics

  Sam Harris (2011). “The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values”, p.4, Simon and Schuster

  11 Copy quote

• Life is a continuous flux. Our nonhuman ancestors bred, generation after generation, and incrementally begat what we now deem to be the species homo sapiens - ourselves. There is nothing about our ancestral line or about our current biology that dictates how we will evolve in the future. Nothing in the natural order demands that our descendants resemble us in any particular way. Very likely, they will not resemble us. We will almost certainly transform ourselves, likely beyond recognition, in the generations to come.

  Sam Harris

  Life, Order, Demand

  11 Copy quote

Page 3 of 10

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin