Welcome to our collection of quotes by Sam Harris. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Sam Harris
Samuel Benjamin Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American philosopher, neuroscientist, author, and podcast host. His work touches on a wide range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. Harris came to prominence for his criticism of religion, and Islam in particular, and is known as one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett.
Harris's first book, The End of Faith (2004), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction and remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 33 weeks. Harris has since written six additional books: Letter to a Christian Nation in 2006, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values in 2010, the long-form essay Lying in 2011, the short book Free Will in 2012, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion in 2014, and (with British writer Maajid Nawaz) Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue in 2015. Harris's work has been translated into over 20 languages.
Harris has debated with many prominent figures on the topics of God or religion, including William Lane Craig, Jordan Peterson, Rick Warren, Andrew Sullivan, Reza Aslan, David Wolpe, Deepak Chopra, and Jean Houston. Since September 2013, Harris has hosted the Making Sense podcast (originally titled Waking Up), which has a large listenership. In September 2018, Harris released a meditation app, Waking Up with Sam Harris. Harris's views on a range of topics have been discussed in various academic and journalistic venues, attracting both criticism and praise to varying degrees.
Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.
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.
You don't get anything worth getting by pretending to know things you don't know.
Dogma in science really is humiliating when it is recognized as dogma.
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.
Perhaps the most important thing one can discover through the practice of meditation is that the self -- the conventional sense of being a subject, a thinker, an experiencer living inside one's head -- is an illusion.
Meditation ... puts into question more or less everything you tend to do in your search for happiness. But if you lose sight of this, it can become just another strategy for seeking happiness -- a more refined version of the problem you already have.
An argument can be logically valid, but unsound in that it contains a false premise and, therefore, leads to a false conclusion (e.g., Scientists are smart; smart people do not make mistakes; therefore, scientists do not make mistakes).
It is time we recognized that belief is not a private matter; it has never been merely private. In fact, beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is a fount of action in potentia.
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.
Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.
The fact that my continuous and public rejection of Christianity does not worry me in the least should suggest to you just how inadequate I think your reasons for being a Christian are.
Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.
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.
In a world of true abundance you shouldn't have to work to justify your life.
By lying, we deny others a view of the world as it is. Our dishonesty not only influences the choices they make, it often determines the choices they can make--and in ways we cannot always predict. Every lie is a direct assault upon the autonomy of those we lie to.
Words like 'God' and 'Allah' must go the way of 'Apollo' and 'Baal' or they will unmake our world.
To not believe in God is to know that it falls to us to make the world a better place.
Jesus Christ--who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens--can now be eaten in the form of a cracker.
Every person is a puppet who didn't pick his own strings and those strings reach back to the big bang.
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.
The freedom to think out loud on certain topics, without fear of being hounded into hiding or killed, has already been lost.
My view is that no idea is above scrutiny, and no people are beneath dignity.
It is important to realize that our inability to answer a question says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer.
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.
The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific notions of martyrdom and jihad that fully explain the character of Muslim violence.
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.
We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.
Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim Algebra, we will see tht there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality.
There's certainly no unchanging self that is carried through from one moment to the next. Its a processes; it's not a thing. You're a verb more than you're a noun (from the point of view of neuroscience).
I was actually already doing my Ph.D. in neuroscience when September 11 happened. 'The End Of Faith' is essentially what September 11 did to my intellectual career at that moment.
Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.
From my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings.
Ideas matter--and philosophy is the art of thinking about them rigorously. In my view, that should be done in as public a forum as possible.
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?
There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.
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.
The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.
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.
Some ... sexist evil probably predates religion and can be ascribed to our biology, but there is no question that religion promulgates and renders sacrosanct attitudes toward women that would be unseemly in a brachiating ape.
False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.
It's simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.
Let me assure you that my intent is not to offend or merely be provocative. I'm simply worried.
Our pleasures, however refined or easily acquired, are by their very nature fleeting. They begin to subside the instant the arise, only to be replaced by fresh desires or feelings of discomfort.
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.
I don't think there's an interesting boundary between philosophy and science. Science is totally beholden to philosophy. There are philosophical assumptions in science and there's no way to get around that.
Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.
All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the earth.
In my experience with print journalists, the distinction between remarks being uttered on- or off-the-record is held sacrosanct, but the distinction between truth and falsity sometimes isn't.
Unreason is now ascendant in the United States--in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government.
You cannot take death for apostasy seriously and be working for peace.
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.
Principle #1: Avoid dangerous people and dangerous places. Principle #2: Do not defend your property. Principle #3: Respond immediately and escape.
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.
The power of psychedelics... is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime.
George Bush says he speaks to god every day, and Christians love him for it. If George Bush said he spoke to god through his hair dryer, they would think he was mad. I fail to see how the addition of a hair dryer makes it any more absurd.
Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn't care to, or he doesn't exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.
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.
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.
The principal tenet of Jainism is non-harming. Observant Jains will literally not harm a fly. Fundamentalist Jainism and fundamentalist Islam do not have the same consequences, neither logically nor behaviorally.
The core of science is not a mathematical modeling -- it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.
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.
It is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience.
When someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we're told that? God is mysterious.
Everyone who has eyes to see can see that if the God of Abraham exists, He is an utter psychopath -- and the God of Nature too. If you can't see these things just by looking, you have simply closed your eyes to the realities of our world.
We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.
You are using your own moral intuitions to authenticate the wisdom of the Bible -- and then, in the next moment, you assert that we human beings cannot possibly rely upon our own intuitions to rightly guide us in the world.
We do not respect people's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons. If my reasons are good enough for believing what I believe, you will helplessly believe what I believe. I will give you my reasons and reasons are contagious. That is what it is to be a rational human being.
Meditation puts into question more or less everything you tend to do in your search for happiness. But if you lose sight of this, it can become just another strategy for seeking happiness -- a more refined version of the problem you already have.
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.
Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.
Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education.
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.
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.
Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds -- and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe.
It seems to me patently obvious that we can no more respect and tolerate vast differences in notions of human well-being than we can respect or tolerate vast differences in the notions about how disease spreads, or in the safety standards of buildings and airplanes.
What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about 'right' and 'wrong,' or 'good' and 'evil,' and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?
I think when you say to someone You are fool not to believe in evolution or a fool to believe the universe is 6000 years old. I think that gets translated as You are a fool to think that your daughter who died in a car accident is really in heaven with god.