Sam Harris quotes - page 7

In my own case, the most inflammatory statements I have ever made are ones that I have written and remain willing to defend. (Sam Harris)
Most people believe that the Creator of the universe wrote (or dictated) one of their books. Unfortunately, there are many books that pretend to divine authorship, and each makes incompatible claims about how we all must live. View quote
Sam Harris
Anyone familiar with my work knows that I am extremely critical of all religious faiths. View quote
Sam Harris
My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own. That's not to say that all religious people are lunatics or idiots. It's anything but that. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Sam Harris
Human experience depends on everything that can influence states of the human brain, ranging from changes in our genome to changes in the global economy. View quote
Sam Harris
The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good. View quote
Sam Harris
One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced. View quote
Sam Harris
The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors. (Sam Harris)
The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms. View quote
Sam Harris
Many scientists have been drawn to Buddhism out of a sense that the Western tradition has delivered an impoverished conception of basic, human sanity. In the West, if you speak to yourself out loud all day long, you are considered crazy. But speaking to yourself silently - thinking incessantly - is considered perfectly normal. View quote
Sam Harris
The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science. View quote
Sam Harris
We have Christians against Muslims against Jews, and no matter how liberal your theology, merely identifying yourself as a Christian or a Jew lends tacit validity to this status quo. People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole. View quote
Sam Harris
There must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life. View quote
Sam Harris
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. View quote
Sam Harris
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. View quote
Sam Harris
The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It's really no more inflammatory than that. View quote
Sam Harris
Many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of 'spirituality' or 'mysticism' to be synonymous with mental illness, conscious fraud, or self-deception. I have argued elsewhere that this is a problem - because millions of people have had experiences for which 'spiritual' and 'mystical' seem the only terms available. View quote
Sam Harris
Spiritual life can certainly follow the pattern one sees in the fake martial arts, with most teachers making nebulous and magical claims that never get tested, while their students derange themselves with weird ideas, empty rituals, and other affectations. (Sam Harris)
The fact that one can lose one's sense of self in an ocean of tranquility does not mean that one's consciousness is immaterial or that it presided over the birth of the universe. View quote
Sam Harris
You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. View quote
Sam Harris
Nearly half of the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. This dewy-eyed nihilism provides absolutely no incentive to build a sustainable civilization. Many of these people are lunatics, but they are not the lunatic fringe. View quote
Sam Harris
Science does not limit itself merely to what is currently verifiable. But it is interested in questions that are potentially verifiable (or, rather, falsifiable). View quote
Sam Harris