Top 300 Sam Harris Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.”

— Sam Harris

2. “You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.”

— Sam Harris

Featured in: Attitude Quotes

3. “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

Featured in: Empathy Quotes, Care Quotes, Humanism Quotes, Loss Quotes, Suffering Quotes

4. “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

Featured in: Mindfulness Quotes

5. “To not believe in God is to know that it falls to us to make the world a better place.”

— Sam Harris

6. “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

Featured in: Doubt Quotes

7. “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

8. “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

9. “It is important to realize that our inability to answer a question says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer.”

— Sam Harris

10. “You don’t get anything worth getting, by pretending to know things you don’t know.”

— Sam Harris

11. “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

12. “Atheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations.”

— Sam Harris

13. “We are all prisoners of our thoughts.”

— Sam Harris

14. “Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle.”

— Sam Harris

15. “You can do what you decide to do – but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.”

— Sam Harris

16. “People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.”

— Sam Harris

Featured in: Strong Quotes

17. “The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good.”

— Sam Harris

18. “It is time we admitted that we are not at war with terrorism. We are at war with Islam.”

— Sam Harris

19. “Theology is ignorance with wings.”

— Sam Harris

20. “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.”

— Sam Harris

21. “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.”

— Sam Harris

22. “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

23. “If premarital sex is a sin, who is the victim?”

— Sam Harris

24. “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

25. “The truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death.”

— Sam Harris

26. “You are using your own moral intuitions to authenticate the wisdom of the Bible – and then, in the next moment, you assert that we human beings cannot possibly rely upon our own intuitions to rightly guide us in the world.”

— Sam Harris

Featured in: Intuition Quotes

27. “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

28. “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.”

— Sam Harris

Featured in: Suffering Quotes, Quotes About Facts

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

— Sam Harris

30. “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

31. “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

32. “Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.”

— Sam Harris

33. “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

34. “Islam, at the moment, is the motherlode of bad ideas.”

— Sam Harris

35. “The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.”

— Sam Harris

36. “The principal tenet of Jainism is non-harming. Observant Jains will literally not harm a fly. Fundamentalist Jainism and fundamentalist Islam do not have the same consequences, neither logically nor behaviorally.”

— Sam Harris

37. “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

38. “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.”

— Sam Harris

39. “Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.”

— Sam Harris

40. “Everyone who has eyes to see can see that if the God of Abraham exists, He is an utter psychopath – and the God of Nature too. If you can’t see these things just by looking, you have simply closed your eyes to the realities of our world.”

— Sam Harris

41. “The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms.”

— Sam Harris

42. “What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ or ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?”

— Sam Harris

43. “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

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

— Sam Harris

45. “Some beliefs are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them.”

— Sam Harris

46. “The second commandment is “Thou shall not construct any graven images.” Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity?”

— Sam Harris

47. “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

48. “All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the earth.”

— Sam Harris

49. “The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It’s really no more inflammatory than that.”

— Sam Harris

50. “This is how you play tennis without the net.”

— Sam Harris