Top 300 Sam Harris Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “In fact, we can directly experience that consciousness is never improved or harmed by what it knows. Making this discovery, again and again, is the basis of spiritual life.”

— Sam Harris

152. “Words like ‘God’ and ‘Allah’ must go the way of ‘Apollo’ and ‘Baal’ or they will unmake our world.”

— Sam Harris

153. “Any conception of human well-being you could plausibly have, the Taliban patently fails to maximize it.”

— Sam Harris

154. “This is not to say that external circumstances do not matter. But it is your mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determines the quality of your life. Your mind is the basis of everything you experience.”

— Sam Harris

155. “I cannot take credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of a psychopath.”

— Sam Harris

156. “The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics.”

— Sam Harris

157. “The principal enemy of mindfulness – or of any meditative practice – is our deeply conditioned habit of being distracted by thoughts. The problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without knowing that we are thinking.”

— Sam Harris

158. “Despite our attachment to notions of free will, most us know that disorders of the brain can trump the best intentions of the mind.”

— Sam Harris

159. “Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.”

— Sam Harris

160. “Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.”

— Sam Harris

161. “Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is denial – at once full of hope and full of fear – of the vastitude of human ignorance.”

— Sam Harris

162. “Consciousness is already free of everything that remotely resembles a self”.”

— Sam Harris

163. “The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand – that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character in this moment – is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in the first place. Although science may ultimately show us how to truly maximize human well-being, it may still fail to dispel the fundamental mystery of our being itself.”

— Sam Harris

164. “It’s simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.”

— Sam Harris

165. “The perpetrators of the Inquisition – the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions – were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God – popes, bishops, friars, and priests.”

— Sam Harris

166. “Becoming a part of a movement doesn’t help anybody think clearly.”

— Sam Harris

167. “To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say that I would have lived in a different universe had I been in a different universe.”

— Sam Harris

168. “You know, when you get to the New World and you develop your three branches of government and you have a civil society, you can just jettison all the barbarism I recommended in the first books.”

— Sam Harris

169. “Your principal concern appears to be that the creator of the universe will take offense at something people do while naked.”

— Sam Harris

170. “Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.”

— Sam Harris

171. “There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality.”

— Sam Harris

172. “Each of us is looking for a path back to the present:.”

— Sam Harris

173. “There’s no way to reconcile Islam with Christianity. This difference of opinion admits of compromise as much as a coin toss does.”

— Sam Harris

174. “If Jesus does come down out of the clouds like a superhero, Christianity will stand revealed as a science. That will be the science of Christianity.”

— Sam Harris

175. “Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.”

— Sam Harris

176. “When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives – about how they appear, their reputations, or their prospects in the world.”

— Sam Harris

177. “One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.”

— Sam Harris

178. “Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.”

— Sam Harris

179. “Merely accepting that we are lazy, distracted, petty, easily provoked to anger, and inclined to waste our time in ways that we will later regret is not a path to happiness.”

— Sam Harris

180. “Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others. Given this fact, it makes sense to train it.”

— Sam Harris

181. “Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected. But the one lied to almost never shares this view. The moment we consider our dishonesty from the point of view of those we lie to, we recognize that we would feel betrayed if the roles were reversed.”

— Sam Harris

182. “The only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation.”

— Sam Harris

183. “Could there be any doubt that the Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again, knowing that his body was now readily accessible in the form of defenseless crackers?”

— Sam Harris

184. “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.”

— Sam Harris

185. “We are now in the 21st century: all books, including the Koran, should be fair game for flushing down the toilet without fear of violent reprisal.”

— Sam Harris

186. “Some people are content in the midst of deprivation and danger, while others are miserable despite having all the luck in the world. This is not to say that external circumstances do not matter. But it is your mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determines the quality of your life. Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others. Given this fact, it makes sense to train it.”

— Sam Harris

187. “Each increment of knowledge imparted in this way is so satisfying-and one’s ignorance at every stage so consequential-that the process of learning BJJ can become remarkably addictive. I have never experienced anything quite like it.”

— Sam Harris

188. “Long before reaching this kind of stability in meditation, however, one can discover that the sense of self – the sense that there is a thinker behind one’s thoughts, an experiencer amid the flow of experience – is an illusion. 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. Consider.”

— Sam Harris

189. “Critiquing Islam, critiquing any idea, is not bigotry. “Islamophobia” is a troubled and inherently unhelpful term. Yes, hatred of Muslims by neo-Nazi-style groups does exist, and it is a form of cultural intolerance, but that must never be conflated with the free-speech right to critique Islam. Islam is, after all, an idea; we cannot expect its merits or demerits to be accepted if we cannot openly debate it.”

— Sam Harris

190. “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

191. “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

192. “We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain – and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running.”

— Sam Harris

193. “How would your relationships change if you resolved never to lie again? What truths about yourself might suddenly come into view? What kind of person would you become? And how might you change the people around you? It is worth finding out.”

— Sam Harris

194. “Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste: Everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.”

— Sam Harris

195. “Honest people are a refuge: You know they mean what they say; you know they will not say one thing to your face and another behind your back; you know they will tell you when they think you have failed – and for this reason their praise cannot be mistaken for mere flattery.”

— Sam Harris

196. “There is no reason whatsoever to think that Buddhism can compete successfully with the relentless evangelizing of Christianity and Islam. Nor should it try to.”

— Sam Harris

197. “If one didn’t know better, one would think that man, in his fear of losing all that he loves, had created heaven, along with its gatekeeper God, in his own image.”

— Sam Harris

198. “We can’t say, “Listen, you barbarians: These holy books of yours are filled with murderous nonsense. In the interest of getting you to behave like civilized human beings, we’re going to redact them and give you back something that reads like Kahlil Gibran. There you go... Don’t you feel better now that you no longer hate homosexuals?” However, that’s really what one should be able to do in any intellectual tradition in the twenty-first century.”

— Sam Harris

199. “Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying attention to what it is actually like to be what we are. The moment we do pay attention, we begin to see that free will is nowhere to be found, and our subjectivity is perfectly compatible with this truth. Thoughts and actions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do? The truth about us is stranger than many suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.”

— Sam Harris

200. “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