Sam Harris Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.

  Sam Harris

  Believe, People, May

  "The End of Faith". Book by Sam Harris, samharris.org. August 11, 2004.

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• Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle.

  Sam Harris

  Philosophy, Views, Atheism

  "Letter to a Christian Nation". Book by Sam Harris, p. 51, September 19, 2006.

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• 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?

  Sam Harris

  Our World, Evil, Worry

  Sam Harris (2011). “The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values”, p.64, Simon and Schuster

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• The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive.

  Sam Harris

  Atheist, Talking, Religion

  "Letter to a Christian Nation". Book by Sam Harris, reason.com. January 8, 2008.

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• It's not so much religion per se, it's false certainty that worries me, and religion just has more than its fair share of false certainty or dogmatism. I'm really concerned when I see people pretending to know things they clearly cannot know.

  Sam Harris

  Worry, People, Pretending

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• A person who believes that Elvis is still alive is very unlikely to get promoted to a position of great power and responsibility in our society. Neither will a person who believes that the holocaust was a hoax. But people who believe equally irrational things about God and the bible are now running our country. This is genuinely terrifying.

  Sam Harris

  Running, Country, Believe

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• It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Atheist, Civilization

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• 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.

  Sam Harris

  School, Men, Our World

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.25, W. W. Norton & Company

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• 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

  Causes, Determined, Chance

  Sam Harris (2012). “Free Will”, p.5, Simon and Schuster

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• Religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty . . . exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the . . . false to achieve primacy over the facts.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Religion, Facts

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• 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.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Atheist, Civilization

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.45, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.

  Sam Harris

  Atheist, Atheism, Belief

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• Life is a continuous flux. Our nonhuman ancestors bred, generation after generation, and incrementally begat what we now deem to be the species homo sapiens - ourselves. There is nothing about our ancestral line or about our current biology that dictates how we will evolve in the future. Nothing in the natural order demands that our descendants resemble us in any particular way. Very likely, they will not resemble us. We will almost certainly transform ourselves, likely beyond recognition, in the generations to come.

  Sam Harris

  Life, Order, Demand

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• We have Christians against Muslims against Jews. They're making incompatible claims on real estate in the Middle East as though God were some kind of omniscient real estate broker parsing out parcels of land to his chosen flock. People are literally dying over ancient literature.

  Sam Harris

  Christian, Real, Land

  "Religion Reason Debate". Video, C-SPAN.Org, January 25, 2007.

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• Most of us are wiser than we may appear to be. … On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice.

  Sam Harris

  Profound, Advice, Levels

  Sam Harris (2014). “Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion”, p.15, Simon and Schuster

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• The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Europe, Civilization

  "The End Of Liberalism?" by Sam Harris, samharris.org. September 19, 2006.

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• One of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty-first century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns-about ethics, spiritual experience, and the inevitability of human suffering-in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. We desperately need a public discourse that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty. Nothing stands in the way of this project more that the respect we accord religious faith.

  Sam Harris

  Spiritual, Religious, Honesty

  Sam Harris (2006). “Letter to a Christian Nation”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

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• 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

  Faith, Religious, Criticism

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.64, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments , and a passionate unwillingness to do so.

  Sam Harris

  Differences, Passionate, Argument

  "Science Must Destroy Religion" by Sam Harris, en.wikiquote.org. January 02, 2006.

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• Unreason is now ascendant in the United States - in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. 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

  Believe, School, Ignorance

  "The Politics of Ignorance". www.huffingtonpost.com. August 02, 2005.

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• About 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent deity.

  Sam Harris

  Believe, Book, Beer

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.17, W. W. Norton & Company

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• It is difficult to think of anything more important than providing the best education possible for our children. They will develop the next technologies, medical cures, and global industries, while mitigating their unintended effects, or they will fail to do these things and consign us all to oblivion.

  Sam Harris

  Children, Technology, Thinking

  "A New Year’s Resolution for the Rich" by Sam Harris, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 29, 2010.

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• [I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.

  Sam Harris

  Faith, Religious, Lying

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.72, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Islam, at the moment, is the motherlode of bad ideas.

  Sam Harris

  Ideas, Islam, Moments

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• 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.

  Sam Harris

  Character, Islam, Violence

  "Sam Harris on the Reality of Islam". www.truthdig.com. February 08, 2006.

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