Top 300 Sam Harris Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “An average Christian, in an average church, listen to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse – and there have been some extraordinary arrogant scientists.”

— Sam Harris

102. “Honesty is a gift we can give to others. It is also a source of power and an engine of simplicity. Knowing that we will attempt to tell the truth, whatever the circumstances, leaves us with little to prepare for. We can simply be ourselves.”

— Sam Harris

103. “We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.”

— Sam Harris

104. “Fundamentalism is only a problem if the fundamentals are a problem.”

— Sam Harris

105. “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

106. “The feeling that we call “I” is itself the product of thought. Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking.”

— Sam Harris

107. “When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don’t believe as you do.”

— Sam Harris

108. “Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a thelogically defensible reading of the Bible.”

— Sam Harris

109. “It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for.”

— Sam Harris

110. “One of the problems with religion is that it creates in-group loyalty and out-group hostility, even when members of one’s own group are behaving like psychopaths.”

— Sam Harris

111. “Remaining open to the powers of conversation – to new evidence and better arguments – is not only essential for rationality. It is essential for love.”

— Sam Harris

112. “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

113. “You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps.”

— Sam Harris

114. “Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.”

— Sam Harris

115. “Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.”

— Sam Harris

116. “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.”

— Sam Harris

117. “Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects.”

— Sam Harris

118. “Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they do confirm some well-established truths about the human mind: Our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world.”

— Sam Harris

119. “The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.”

— Sam Harris

120. “We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence.”

— Sam Harris

121. “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.”

— Sam Harris

122. “Have you ever traveled, beyond all mere metaphors, to the Mountain of Shame and stayed for a thousand years? I do not recommend it.”

— Sam Harris

123. “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.”

— Sam Harris

124. “The burn of lifting weights, for instance, would be excruciating if it were a symptom of terminal illness. But because it is associated with health and fitness, most people find it enjoyable. Here we see that cognition and emotion are not separate. The way we think about experience can completely determine how we feel about it.”

— Sam Harris

125. “Here we come upon a terrible facet of ethically asymmetric warfare: when your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another weapon in his hand.”

— Sam Harris

126. “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

127. “Thoughts themselves are not a problem, but being identified with thought is.”

— Sam Harris

128. “But the true discipline is to remain committed, throughout the whole of one’s life, to waking up from the dream of the self.”

— Sam Harris

129. “The truth, however, is that the conflict between religion and science is unavoidable. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.”

— Sam Harris

130. “The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathetical modeling; it is intellectual honesty. It is time we acknowledge a basic feature of human discourse: 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.”

— Sam Harris

131. “I still considered the world’s religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble.”

— Sam Harris

132. “Happily, the benefits of training in meditation arrive long before mastery does.”

— Sam Harris

133. “We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.”

— Sam Harris

134. “Consciousness is the one thing in the universe that cannot be an illusion – even if I’m a brain in a vat, all my memories are false, and my perceptions are of a world that doesn’t exist, I’m still having an experience.”

— Sam Harris

135. “People have been murdered over cartoons. End of moral analysis.”

— Sam Harris

136. “I’m the Ted Bundy of string theory.”

— Sam Harris

137. “Sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual understanding – these and other sources of moral wealth are destroyed the moment we deliberately misrepresent our beliefs, whether or not our lies are ever discovered.”

— Sam Harris

138. “Speaking from personal experience, I think that losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics – by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck. Is.”

— Sam Harris

139. “I take seriously the idea that we’re in a simulation. I have no idea whether or not it’s true, but if it is, if we are in a simulation, it’s not that nothing is real, not that there are no tables and chairs and trees. Rather, it’s that they exist in a different form from what we first thought. There’s a level of computation underneath what we take to be physical reality.”

— Sam Harris

140. “The burn of lifting weights, for instance, would be excruciating if it were a symptom of terminal illness. But because it is associated with health and fitness, most people find it enjoyable.”

— Sam Harris

141. “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

142. “While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its liabilities. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us incapable of criticizing ideas that are now patently absurd and increasingly maladaptive.”

— Sam Harris

143. “The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.”

— Sam Harris

144. “The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer obscured.”

— Sam Harris

145. “Eventually, it begins to seem as if you are repeatedly awakening from a dream to find yourself safely in bed. No matter how terrible the dream, the relief is instantaneous.”

— Sam Harris

146. “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.”

— Sam Harris

147. “People have been cherry-picking the Bible for millennia to justify their every impulse, moral and otherwise.”

— Sam Harris

148. “In a world of true abundance you shouldn’t have to work to justify your life.”

— Sam Harris

149. “We grasp at transitory pleasures. We brood about the past and worry about the future. We continually seek to prop up and defend an egoic self that doesn’t exist.”

— Sam Harris

150. “We do not know what we intend to do until the intention itself arises. To understand this is to realize that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose.”

— Sam Harris