Sam Harris Quotes
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.
The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.
Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.
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.
There's no way to reconcile Islam with Christianity. This difference of opinion admits of compromise as much as a coin toss does.
Let me assure you that my intent is not to offend or merely be provocative. I'm simply worried.
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.
The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific notions of martyrdom and jihad that fully explain the character of Muslim violence.
The freedom to think out loud on certain topics, without fear of being hounded into hiding or killed, has already been lost.
The power of psychedelics... is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime.
Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.
We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.
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.
The fact that my continuous and public rejection of Christianity does not worry me in the least should suggest to you just how inadequate I think your reasons for being a Christian are.
Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected.
One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.
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.
The wealthiest Americans often live as though they and their children had nothing to gain from investments in education, infrastructure, clean-energy, and scientific research.
We know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.
There is no reason whatsoever to think that Buddhism can compete successfully with the relentless evangelizing of Christianity and Islam. Nor should it try to.
I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror.
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.
The problem of human suffering is never too much rational thinking, or too high a demand for evidence. But the solutions are. ... Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.
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.
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.
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.
The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms.
It is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience.
From my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings.
The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia ago-and who seems to have abandoned them to bloodshed in his name ever since-is no one to consult on questions of ethics.
It is time we admitted that we are not at war with “terrorism.” We are at war with Islam.
If one doesn't value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?
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.
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.
Could there be any doubt that the Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again, knowing that his body was now readily accessible in the form of defenseless crackers?
We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence.
We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.
Science does not limit itself merely to what is currently verifiable. But it is interested in questions that are potentially verifiable (or, rather, falsifiable).
Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects.
To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say that I would have lived in a different universe had I been in a different universe.