Top 300 Sam Harris Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror.”

— Sam Harris

202. “I remember feeling the jolt of history when the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center. For many of us, that was the moment we understood that things can go terribly wrong in our world – not because life is unfair or moral progress impossible but because we have failed, generation after generation, to abolish the delusions and animosities of our ignorant ancestors.”

— Sam Harris

203. “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

204. “I don’t always communicate the truth in the way that I want to – but one of the strengths of telling the truth is that it remains open for elaboration. If what you say in the heat of the moment isn’t quite right, you can amend it. I have learned that I would rather be maladroit, or even rude, than dishonest.”

— Sam Harris

205. “My friend Joseph Goldstein, one of the finest vipassana teachers I know, likens this shift in awareness to the experience of being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you are sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall.”

— Sam Harris

206. “Rather than support the rights of women and girls to not live as slaves, for instance, Western liberals support the right of theocrats to treat their wives and daughters however they want – and to be spared offensive cartoons in the meantime.”

— Sam Harris

207. “Nothing is more sacred than the facts.”

— Sam Harris

208. “Aceptar mantener un secreto es asumir una carga.”

— Sam Harris

209. “Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next – a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please – your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision” and believe that you are in the process of making it.”

— Sam Harris

210. “The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness – rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it.”

— Sam Harris

211. “Honesty is a gift we can give to others. It is also a source of power and an engine of simplicity.”

— Sam Harris

212. “You don’t choose to choose what you choose in life!”

— Sam Harris

213. “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

214. “Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.”

— Sam Harris

215. “There will always be some delay between the first neuropsychological events that kindle my next conscious thought and the thought itself. And even if they weren’t – even if all mental states were truly coincident with their underlying brain states – I cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know – it just happens. Where is the freedom in that?”

— Sam Harris

216. “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

217. “Where is the freedom in being perfectly satisfied with your thoughts, intentions, and subsequent actions when they are the product of prior events that you had absolutely no hand in creating?”

— Sam Harris

218. “But while having some choice is generally good, it seems that having too many options tends to undermine our feelings of satisfaction, no matter which option we choose.”

— Sam Harris

219. “It is easy to see what many people, women especially, admire about Sarah Palin. Here is a mother of five who can see the bright side of having a child with Down syndrome and still find the time and energy to govern the state of Alaska.”

— Sam Harris

220. “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.”

— Sam Harris

221. “It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.”

— Sam Harris

222. “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

223. “The moment one begins thinking about morality in terms of well-being, it becomes remarkably easy to discern a moral hierarchy across human societies.”

— Sam Harris

224. “The urge for retribution depends upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior.”

— Sam Harris

225. “One must be able to pay attention closely enough to glimpse what consciousness is like between thoughts – that is, prior to the arising of the next one. Consciousness does not feel like a self. Once one realizes this, the status of thoughts themselves, as transient expressions of consciousness, can be understood.”

— Sam Harris

226. “If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, then some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlightened than others; and some world views will be mistaken in ways that cause needless human misery.”

— Sam Harris

227. “A review of the psychological literature suggests that mindfulness in particular fosters many components of physical and mental health: It improves immune function, blood pressure, and cortisol levels; it reduces anxiety, depression, neuroticism, and emotional reactivity. It also leads to greater behavioral regulation and has shown promise in the treatment of addiction and eating disorders. Unsurprisingly, the practice is associated with increased subjective well-being.13.”

— Sam Harris

228. “To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.”

— Sam Harris

229. “As human being, we live in a perpetual conversation between conversation and violence; what apart from fundamental willingness to be reasonable, can guarantee that we will keep talking to one another?”

— Sam Harris

230. “Faith is the mortar that fills the cracks in the evidence and the gaps in the logic, and thus it is faith that keeps the whole terrible edifice of religious certainty still looming dangerously over our world.”

— Sam Harris

231. “Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime – as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day – but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe.”

— Sam Harris

232. “Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment.”

— Sam Harris

233. “The more we understand ourselves at the level of the brain, the more we will see that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human values.”

— Sam Harris

234. “In fact, beginning meditators often think that they are able to concentrate on a single object, such as the breath, for minutes at a time, only to report after days or weeks of intensive practice that their attention is now carried away by thought every few seconds. This is actually progress. It takes a certain degree of concentration to even notice how distracted you are. Even if your life depended on it, you could not spend a full minute free of thought.”

— Sam Harris

235. “People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true. The more consequential the beliefs – that is, the more a person’s well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or of other people’s opinions – the more consequential the lie.”

— Sam Harris

236. “Although many things can be said in criticism of religious faith, there is no discounting its power. Millions among us, even now, are quite willing to die for our unjustified beliefs, and millions more, it seems, are willing to kill for them.”

— Sam Harris

237. “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

238. “Anyone who wants to understand the world should be open to new facts and new arguments, even on subjects where his or her views are very well established. Similarly, anyone truly interested in morality – in the principles of behavior that allow people to flourish – should be open to new evidence and new arguments that bear upon questions of happiness and suffering. Clearly, the chief enemy of open conversation is dogmatism in all its forms. Dogmatism.”

— Sam Harris

239. “Arranging atoms in certain ways appears to bring about an experience of being that very collection of atoms. This is undoubtedly one of the deepest mysteries given to us to contemplate.”

— Sam Harris

240. “The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia ago-and who seems to have abandoned them to bloodshed in his name ever since-is no one to consult on questions of ethics.”

— Sam Harris

241. “None of these adventitious mental states are the real you. You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.”

— Sam Harris

242. “Choosing beliefs freely is not what rational minds do.”

— Sam Harris

243. “Over one million people died in the orgy of religious killing that attended the partitioning of India and Pakistan. The two countries have since fought three official wars, suffered a continuous bloodletting at their shared border, and are now poised to exterminate one another with nuclear weapons simply because they disagree about “facts” that are every bit as fanciful as the names of Santa’s reindeer.”

— Sam Harris

244. “Critiquing Islam, critiquing any idea, is not bigotry.”

— Sam Harris

245. “Every lie is an assault on the autonomy of those we lie to.”

— Sam Harris

246. “In the best case, faith leaves otherwise well-intentioned people incapable of thinking rationally about many of their deepest concerns; at worst, it is a continuous source of human violence.”

— Sam Harris

247. “Moderates want their faith respected. They don’t want faith itself criticized, and yet faith itself is what is bringing us all this – this lunacy.”

— Sam Harris

248. “Recently, crowds of thousands gathered throughout the Muslim world – burning European embassies, issuing threats, taking hostages, even killing people – in protest over twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that were first published in a Danish newspaper. When was the last atheist riot?”

— Sam Harris

249. “Once a person believes – really believes – that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.”

— Sam Harris

250. “The doors leading out of the prison of scriptural literalism simply do not open from the inside.”

— Sam Harris