Sam Harris Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

• When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don't believe as you do.

  Sam Harris

  Atheist, Believe, Differences

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• What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.

  Sam Harris

  Atheist, Atheism, Belief

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• 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

  Lying, Understanding, Definitions

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• 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

  Yesterday, Sacred, Reason

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.24, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention—distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence—is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Ideas, Mind

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.25, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I think when you say to someone You are fool not to believe in evolution or a fool to believe the universe is 6000 years old. I think that gets translated as You are a fool to think that your daughter who died in a car accident is really in heaven with god.

  Sam Harris

  Daughter, Believe, Thinking

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• 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

  Failure, Wrong Answers, Problem

  Sam Harris (2014). “Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion”, p.16, Simon and Schuster

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• A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual experience, ethical behavior, and strong communities are essential for human happiness. And yet our religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous. While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it.

  Sam Harris

  Spiritual, Religious, Strong

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.221, W. W. Norton & Company

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

  Sam Harris

  Zero, Reason, Scientist

  "The Politics of Ignorance" by Sam Harris, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 2, 2005.

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• If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won't matter how successful you become or who is in your life - you won't enjoy any of it.

  Sam Harris

  Confused, Successful, Matter

  Sam Harris (2014). “Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion”, p.2, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Believe, Years, Two

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

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• 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

  Religious, Children, Might

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

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

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Atheist, People

  "There is No God (And You Know It)" by Sam Harris, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 6, 2005.

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• How can we encourage other human beings to extend their moral sympathies beyond a narrow locus? How can we learn to become mere human beings, shorn of any more compelling national, ethnic, or religious identity? We can be reasonable. It is in the very nature of reason to fuse cognitive and moral horizons. Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.

  Sam Harris

  Love, Religious, Identity

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.190, W. W. Norton & Company

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

  Sam Harris

  Book, Religion, Ordinary

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

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• We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses. And then we come across another of God’s teachings on morality: if a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father’s doorstep (Deuteronomy 22:13-21).

  Sam Harris

  Father, Teaching, Night

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

  Sam Harris

  Thinking, Topics, Hiding

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• Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.

  Sam Harris

  World, Claims, Reasonable

  "Science Must Destroy Religion" by Sam Harris, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 2, 2006.

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• 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

  Tolerance, Limits, Claims

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• Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe.

  Sam Harris

  Believe, Thinking, Effort

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• One of the worst things about breaking the law is that it puts one at odds with an indeterminate number of other people. This is among the many corrosive effects of having unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically blameless.

  Sam Harris

  Lying, Odds, Law

  Sam Harris (2013). “Lying”, p.33, Four Elephants Press

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• It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion—to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions and religious diversions of scarce resources—is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, War, Hatred

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

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• I'm the Ted Bundy of string theory.

  Sam Harris

  Ted Bundy, Strings, Theory

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

  Sam Harris

  Facts, Conscious, Well Being

  "Sam Harris: Can Science Determine Human Values?". library.fora.tv. November 10, 2010.

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• We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.

  Sam Harris

  Differences, Natural

  Sam Harris (2011). “The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values”, p.101, Simon and Schuster

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