Samuel Benjamin Harris is an American author, philosopher, neuroscientist, and podcast host. Profoundly inspirational Sam Harris quotes will brighten up your day and make you feel ready to take on anything.
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Famous Sam Harris Quotes
Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn’t care to, or he doesn’t exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely. Sam Harris
Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn’t care to, or he doesn’t exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely. Sam Harris
Consider it every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime? Sam Harris
The problem with religion, because it’s been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation. Sam Harris
While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. It is telling that this aura of nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers. Anyone caught worshipping Poseidon, even at sea, will be thought insane. Sam Harris
Consider it every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime? Sam Harris
If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic? Sam Harris
A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings. Sam Harris
The problem with religion, because it’s been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation. Sam Harris
If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic? Sam Harris
A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings. Sam Harris
While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. It is telling that this aura of nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers. Anyone caught worshipping Poseidon, even at sea, will be thought insane. Sam Harris
We are all prisoners of our thoughts. Sam Harris
You can do what you decide to do but you cannot decide what you will decide to do. Sam Harris
The habit of spending nearly every waking moment lost in thought leaves us at the mercy of whatever our thoughts happen to be. Meditation is a way of breaking this spell. Sam Harris
How we pay attention to the present moment determin es the character of our experience and the quality of our lives. Sam Harris
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
Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything anything be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.Sam Harris
You don’t get anything worth getting, by pretending to know things you don’t know. Sam Harris
In fact, atheism is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a non astrologer or a non alchemist. We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. Sam Harris
How we pay attention to the present moment determin es the character of our experience and the quality of our lives. Sam Harris
It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail. Sam Harris
Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything anything be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in. Sam Harris
We are all prisoners of our thoughts. Sam Harris
You can do what you decide to do but you cannot decide what you will decide to do. Sam Harris
The habit of spending nearly every waking moment lost in thought leaves us at the mercy of whatever our thoughts happen to be. Meditation is a way of breaking this spell. Sam Harris
Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. According to the United Nations Human Development Report 2005, they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations’ human development index are unwaveringly religious. Sam Harris
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts. Sam Harris
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts. Sam Harris
Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. What if someone says, Well, that’s not how I choose to think about water.? All we can do is appeal to scientific values. And if he doesn’t share those values, the conversation is over. If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic? Sam Harris
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
This is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own. Sam Harris
Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality. Sam Harris
People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. Sam Harris
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
As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population. Sam Harris
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
It is rather more noble to help people purely out of concern for their suffering than it is to help them because you think the Creator of the Universe wants you to do it, or will reward you for doing it, or will punish you for not doing it. The problem with this linkage between religion and morality is that it gives people bad reasons to help other human beings when good reasons are available. Sam Harris
The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we will kill you. Sam Harris
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
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
Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance. Sam Harris
People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. Sam Harris
You almost never get the pleasure of seeing that you won the argument in real time. People just don’t like to publicly change their minds. They change their minds in private. Sam Harris
Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings. This explains why Christians like yourself expend more moral energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide. It explains why you are more concerned about human embryos than about the lifesaving promise of stem cell research. And it explains why you can preach against condom use in sub Saharan Africa while millions die from AIDS there each year. 25 Sam Harris
You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm. Sam Harris
Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have. Sam Harris
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
We do not know what awaits each of us after death, but we know that we will die. Clearly, it must be possible to live ethically with a genuine concern for the happiness of other sentient beings without presuming to know things about which we are patently ignorant. Consider it every person you have ever met, every person you will pass in the street today, is going to die. Living long enough, each will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime? Sam Harris
Jesus Christ who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens can now be eaten in the form of a cracker. Sam Harris
Although many things can be said in criticism of religious faith, there is no discounting its power. Millions among us, even now, are quite willing to die for our unjustified beliefs, and millions more, it seems, are willing to kill for them. Sam Harris
Science is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national, and political boundaries. You don’t have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science. Sam Harris
Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world. Sam Harris
We do not respect people’s beliefs, we evaluate their reasons. If my reasons are good enough for believing what I believe, you will helplessly believe what I believe. I will give you my reasons and reasons are contagious. That is what it is to be a rational human being. Sam Harris
120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. Sam Harris
Almost all our suffering is the product of our thoughts. We spend nearly every moment of our lives lost in thought, and hostage to the character of those thoughts. You can break this spell, but it takes training just like it takes training to defend yourself against a physical assault. Sam Harris
We do not know what awaits each of us after death, but we know that we will die. Clearly, it must be possible to live ethically with a genuine concern for the happiness of other sentient beings without presuming to know things about which we are patently ignorant. Consider it every person you have ever met, every person you will pass in the street today, is going to die. Living long enough, each will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime? Sam Harris
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
Jesus Christ who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens can now be eaten in the form of a cracker Sam Harris
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
The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we will kill you. Sam Harris
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
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
It is rather more noble to help people purely out of concern for their suffering than it is to help them because you think the Creator of the Universe wants you to do it, or will reward you for doing it, or will punish you for not doing it. The problem with this linkage between religion and morality is that it gives people bad reasons to help other human beings when good reasons are available. Sam Harris
Science is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national, and political boundaries. You don’t have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science. Sam Harris
As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population. Sam Harris
We do not respect people’s beliefs, we evaluate their reasons. If my reasons are good enough for believing what I believe, you will helplessly believe what I believe. I will give you my reasons and reasons are contagious. That is what it is to be a rational human being. Sam Harris
It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail. Sam Harris
Almost all our suffering is the product of our thoughts. We spend nearly every moment of our lives lost in thought, and hostage to the character of those thoughts. You can break this spell, but it takes training just like it takes training to defend yourself against a physical assault. Sam Harris
The problem is not that religious people are stupid. It’s not that religious fundamentalists are stupid. I happen to think that you can be so well educated that you can build a nuclear bomb, and still get and still believe that you will get the 72 virgins in paradise that is the problem. The problem is that religion because it has been sheltered from criticism as it has been allows people perfectly sane, perfectly intelligent people to believe en masse, what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation. Sam Harris
