Top 300 Sam Harris Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “What I’m asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.”

— Sam Harris

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

— Sam Harris

254. “While we may never achieve closure in our view of the world, it seems extraordinarily likely that our descendants will look upon many of our beliefs as both impossibly quaint and suicidally stupid.”

— Sam Harris

255. “WHICH way should the balance swing? Assuming that we want to maintain a coherent ethical position on these matters, this appears to be a circumstance of forced choice: if we are willing to drop bombs, or even risk that pistol rounds might go astray, we should be willing to torture a certain class of criminal suspects and military prisoners; if we are unwilling to torture, we should be unwilling to wage modern war.”

— Sam Harris

256. “The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still being besieged by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?”

— Sam Harris

257. “Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each. As long as a Christian believes that only his baptized brethren will be saved on the Day of Judgment, he cannot possibly “respect” the beliefs of others, for he knows that the flames of hell have been stoked by these very ideas and await their adherents even now.”

— Sam Harris

258. “This is one of the things I find so insufferable about the liberal backlash against critics of Islam – especially the pernicious meme “Islamophobia,” by which anyone who thinks Islam merits special concern at this moment in history is branded a bigot.”

— Sam Harris

259. “Despite our perennial bad behavior, our moral progress seems to me unmistakable.”

— Sam Harris

260. “Knowing what a person believes on a certain subject is not identical to knowing how that person thinks.”

— Sam Harris

261. “The wealthiest Americans often live as though they and their children had nothing to gain from investments in education, infrastructure, clean-energy, and scientific research.”

— Sam Harris

262. “The difference between killing one man and killing a thousand just doesn’t seem as salient to us as it should. And, as Glover observes, in many cases we will find the former far more disturbing. Three million souls can be starved and murdered in the Congo, and our Argus-eyed media scarcely blink. When a princess dies in a car accident, however, a quarter of the earth’s population falls prostrate with grief. Perhaps we are unable to feel what we must feel in order to change our world.”

— Sam Harris

263. “The question of whether enlightenment is a permanent state need not detain us. The crucial point is that you can glimpse something about the nature of consciousness that will liberate you from suffering in the present.”

— Sam Harris

264. “We cannot live by reason alone.”

— Sam Harris

265. “You are not in control of your mind – because you, as a conscious agent, are only part of your mind, living at the mercy of other parts.”

— Sam Harris

266. “Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature – to say nothing of killing and dying for them – would be impossible to justify. What stops us from finding it impossible now?”

— Sam Harris

267. “Religious moderation is the direct result of taking scripture less and less seriously. So why not take it less seriously still? Why not admit the the Bible is merely a collection of imperfect books written by highly fallible human beings.”

— Sam Harris

268. “Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious.”

— Sam Harris

269. “In those circumstances where we deem it obviously necessary to lie, we have generally determined that the person to be deceived is both dangerous and unreachable by any recourse to the truth. In other words, we have judged the prospects of establishing a genuine relationship with him to be nonexistent.”

— Sam Harris

270. “The men and women on death row have some combination of bad genes, bad parents, bad ideas, and bad luck – which of these quantities, exactly, were they responsible for? No human being stands as author to his own genes or his upbringing, and yet we have every reason to believe that these factors determine his character throughout life.”

— Sam Harris

271. “The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention – distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence – is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity – a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.”

— Sam Harris

272. “While thinking is a practical necessity, the failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, moment after moment, is what gives each of us the feeling that we call “I,” and this is the string upon which all our states of suffering and dissatisfaction are strung.”

— Sam Harris

273. “What constitutes a civil society? At minimum, it is a place where ideas, of all kinds, can be criticized without the risk of physical violence. If you live in a land where certain things cannot be said about the king, or about an imaginary being, or about certain books, because such utterances carry the penalty of death, torture, or imprisonment, you do not live in a civil society. It.”

— Sam Harris

274. “If your denial of death is sufficiently explicit and persuasive that you believe death isn’t real, then what you deny isn’t death but the significance of life.”

— Sam Harris

275. “One thing each of us knows for certain is that reality vastly exceeds our awareness of it.”

— Sam Harris

276. “Few of us are murderers or thieves, but we have all been liars.”

— Sam Harris

277. “We must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it.”

— Sam Harris

278. “Clearly, one of the great tasks of civilization is to create cultural mechanisms that protect us from the moment-to-moment failures of our ethical intuitions.”

— Sam Harris

279. “That so many of us are still dying on account of ancient myths is as bewildering as it is horrible and our own attachment to these myths, whether moderate or extreme, has kept us silent in the face of developments that could ultimately destroy us. Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past.”

— Sam Harris

280. “Indeed, what is startling about the notion of a victimless crime is that even when the behavior in question is genuinely victimless, its criminality is still affirmed by those who are eager to punish it. It is in such cases that the true genius lurking behind many of our laws stands revealed. The idea of a victimless crime is nothing more than a judicial reprise of the Christian notion of sin.”

— Sam Harris

281. “I think it would be extremely helpful if people focused on the ideas being discussed here, rather than on calling you names – which is an easy way to ignore your ideas.”

— Sam Harris

282. “We can either have a twenty-first-century conversation about morality and the human well-being – a conversation in which we avail ourselves of all scientific insights and philosophical arguments that have accumulated in the last two thousand years of human discourse – or we can confine ourselves to a first-century conversation as it is preserved in the Bible.”

— Sam Harris

283. “Making distinctions of this kind, however, is deeply unfashionable in intellectual circles. In my experience, people do not want to hear that Islam supports violence in a way that Jainism doesn’t, or that Buddhism offers a truly sophisticated, empirical approach to understanding the human mind, whereas Christianity presents an almost perfect impediment to such understanding. In many circles, to make invidious comparisons of this kind is to stand convicted of bigotry.”

— Sam Harris

284. “Faith is little more than the shadow cast by our hope for a better life.”

— Sam Harris

285. “The temptation to start each day with several glazed donuts and to end it with an extramarital affair might be difficult for some people to resist, for reasons that are easily understood in evolutionary terms, but there are surely better ways to maximize one’s long-term well-being.”

— Sam Harris

286. “Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each.”

— Sam Harris

287. “What we call reality is just when we all agree about our hallucinations.”

— Sam Harris

288. “And just as some people have obvious moral deficits, others must possess moral talent, moral expertise, and even moral genius. As with any human ability, these gradations must be expressed at the level of the brain. Game.”

— Sam Harris

289. “Everything we want to accomplish – to paint the house, learn a new language, find a better job – is something that promises that, if done, it would allow us to finally relax and enjoy our lives in the present. Generally speaking, this is a false hope.”

— Sam Harris

290. “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

291. “What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are.”

— Sam Harris

292. “Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind.”

— Sam Harris

293. “The sea squirt – a very simple marine creature – swims about during its juvenile phase looking for a place to settle, and once it settles and starts filter feeding, it digests its own brain, because it no longer has any need for perceptual or motor competence. This is often used as an unkind analogy for getting tenure in academia.”

— Sam Harris

294. “Chalmers: It’s awfully hard to define consciousness. But I’d start by saying that it’s the subjective experience of the mind and the world. It’s basically what it feels like, from the first-person point of view, to be thinking and perceiving and judging.”

— Sam Harris

295. “The closest thing in my life to a mistake of that magnitude was the marriage of my dear friend Liza to the Man Whose Name Shall Go Unmentioned.”

— Sam Harris

296. “There’s something it’s like for me to see the green leaves outside my window right now, so that’s a conscious state to me. But there may be some unconscious language-processing going on in my head that doesn’t feel like anything to me, or some motor processes in the cerebellum. Those might be states of me, but they’re not conscious states of me, because there’s nothing it’s like for me to undergo those states.”

— Sam Harris

297. “Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. 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.”

— Sam Harris

298. “We know that trust is deeply rewarding and that deception and suspicion are two sides of the same coin. Research suggests that all forms of lying – including white lies meant to spare the feelings of others – are associated with less satisfying relationships.”

— Sam Harris

299. “A true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time.”

— Sam Harris

300. “Am I free to do that which does not occur to me to do?”

— Sam Harris