Sam Harris Quotes - Page 3

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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

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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

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

Sam Harris

Strong, Atheist, Atheism

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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

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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

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The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.

Sam Harris

Atheist, Talking, Religion

"Letter to a Christian Nation". Book by Sam Harris, reason.com. January 8, 2008.

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A person who believes that Elvis is still alive is very unlikely to get promoted to a position of great power and responsibility in our society. Neither will a person who believes that the holocaust was a hoax. But people who believe equally irrational things about God and the bible are now running our country. This is genuinely terrifying.

Sam Harris

Running, Country, Believe

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about 'right' and 'wrong,' or 'good' and 'evil,' and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?

Sam Harris

Our World, Evil, Worry

Sam Harris (2011). “The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values”, p.64, Simon and Schuster

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

People, Suffering, Religion

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

Sam Harris

Fall, Believe, Religion

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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

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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

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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

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Born: April 9, 1967
Occupation: Author
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