Sam Harris Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Sam Harris's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Author Sam Harris's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 249 quotes on this page collected since April 9, 1967! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • Human well-being is not a random phenomenon. It depends on many factors - ranging from genetics and neurobiology to sociology and economics. But, clearly, there are scientific truths to be known about how we can flourish in this world. Wherever we can have an impact on the well-being of others, questions of morality apply.

    "The Moral Landscape : Thinking About Human Values in Universal Terms" by Sam Harris, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 25, 2010.
  • Science does not limit itself merely to what is currently verifiable. But it is interested in questions that are potentially verifiable (or, rather, falsifiable).

    "Pope ‘Rottweiler’ Barks" by Sam Harris, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 17, 2006.
  • In my own case, the most inflammatory statements I have ever made are ones that I have written and remain willing to defend.

    "The Perils of the Print Interview" by Sam Harris, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 24, 2011.
  • Fundamentalism is only a problem if the fundamentals are a problem

  • 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.

    "On Spiritual Truths" by Sam Harris, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 16, 2011.
  • 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?

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

    "Sam Harris: Can Science Determine Human Values?". library.fora.tv. November 10, 2010.
  • Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence what so ever.

  • The problem I want to talk to you about tonight is the problem of belief. What does it mean to believe? We use this word all the time, and I think behind it lurk some really extraordinary taboos and confusions. What I want to argue tonight is that how we talk about belief- how we fail to criticize or criticize the beliefs of others, has more importance to us personally, more consequence to us personally and to civilization than perhaps anything else that is in our power to influence.

    Believe  
  • 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.

    Sam Harris (2014). “Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion”, p.197, Simon and Schuster
  • Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.

  • 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.

    "Drugs and the Meaning of Life" by Sam Harris, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 6, 2011.
  • 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 (2012). “Free Will”, p.5, Simon and Schuster
  • 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 (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.48, W. W. Norton & Company
  • 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 (2014). “Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion”, p.2, Simon and Schuster
  • The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.

    "There is No God (And You Know It)" by Sam Harris, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 6, 2005.
  • Principle #1: Avoid dangerous people and dangerous places. Principle #2: Do not defend your property. Principle #3: Respond immediately and escape.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

    "On Spiritual Truths" by Sam Harris, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 16, 2011.
  • How we pay attention to the present moment...determin es the character of our experience and...the quality of our lives.

  • There's no way to reconcile Islam with Christianity. This difference of opinion admits of compromise as much as a coin toss does.

  • 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).

  • 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.

  • 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.

    School  
    Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.25, W. W. Norton & Company
  • 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 (2006). “Letter to a Christian Nation”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated
  • 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.

  • Death is, in some ways, unacceptable. It's just an astonishing fact of our being here that we die; but I think worse than that is if we live long enough, we lose everyone we love in this world. I mean people die and disappear, and we're left with this stark mystery: just the sheer not knowing of what happened to them.

    "Sam Harris On Death". Big Think, July 4, 2007.
  • To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world - to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish - is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.

    "The End of Faith". Book by Sam Harris (pages 22-23), 2004.
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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 249 quotes from the Author Sam Harris, starting from April 9, 1967! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!