Sam Harris Quotes

• 

  Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes, 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

  Topics in God

  Tags in Imaginary
• 

  Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.

  Sam Harris

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Theology, Human
• 

  I know of no society in recorded history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

  Sam Harris

  Topics in History, Society

  Tags in Suffered, Reasonable
• 

  Pretending to know things that you do not know is the lifeblood of religion.

  Sam Harris

  Topics in Religion

  Tags in Pretending, Know

• While the religious divisions in our world are self-evident, many people still imagine that religious conflict is always caused by a lack of education, by poverty, or by politics.

  Sam Harris

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Religious, Conflict

• While liberals are leery of religious fundamentalism in general, they consistently imagine that all religions at their core teach the same thing and teach it equally well. This is one of the many delusions borne of political correctness.

  Sam Harris

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Liberals, Fundamentalism

• We’re right to say that a culture that can’t tolerate free speech is… there are a wide range of positive human experiences that are not available in that culture. And we’re right to want those experiences.

  Sam Harris

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Range, Free Speech

• We should reserve the notion of ‘morality’ for the ways in which we can affect one another’s experience for better or worse. Some people use the term ‘morality’ differently, of course, but I think we have a scientific responsibility to focus the conversation so as to make it most useful.

  Sam Harris

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Scientific, Morality

• Tolerance, openness to argument, openness to self-doubt, willingness to see other people’s points of view – these are very liberal and enlightened values that people are right to hold, but we can’t allow them to delude us to the point where we can’t recognise people who are needlessly perpetrating human misery.

  Sam Harris

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Enlightened, Openness

• There must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.

  Sam Harris

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Deem, Some People

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Relentless, Christianity

• There are a few dogmas and double standards and really regrettable exports from philosophy that have confounded the thinking of scientists on the subject of morality.

  Sam Harris

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Scientists, Few

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Scientific, Investments

• The treatment of women in Muslim communities throughout the world is unconscionable. All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the Earth.

  Sam Harris

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Civilized, Theology

• The moment we realize that the only things we can intelligibly value are actual and potential changes in the experience of conscious beings, we can think about a landscape of such changes – where the peaks correspond to the greatest possible well-being and the valleys correspond to the lowest depths of suffering.

  Sam Harris

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Peaks, Landscape

• The fact that one can lose one’s sense of self in an ocean of tranquility does not mean that one’s consciousness is immaterial or that it presided over the birth of the universe.

  Sam Harris

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Universe, Tranquility

• Religious ideas about good and evil tend to focus on how to achieve well-being in the next life, and this makes them terrible guides to securing it in this one. Of course, there are a few gems to be found in every religious tradition, but insofar as these precepts are wise and useful they are not, in principle, religious.

  Sam Harris

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Religious, Few

• Religion provides the only story that is fundamentally consoling in the face of the worst possible experiences – the death of a parent, for instance. In fact, many religions take away the problem entirely, because their adherents ostensibly believe that they’re going to be reunited with everyone they love, and death is an illusion.

  Sam Harris

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Religions, Instance

• Religion has convinced us that there’s something else entirely other than concerns about suffering. There’s concerns about what God wants, there’s concerns about what’s going to happen in the afterlife.

  Sam Harris

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Afterlife, Happen

• Positive social emotions like compassion and empathy are generally good for us, and we want to encourage them. But do we know how to most reliably raise children to care about the suffering of other people? I’m not sure we do.

  Sam Harris

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Empathy, Encourage

Sam Harris (94)

Birth:	1967
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Neuroscientist, Author, Philosopher

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