Sam Harris Quotes - Page 8

Quotes about:

• We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.

  Sam Harris

  Looks, Honest, Profile

  "In Defense of Profiling" by Sam Harris, samharris.org. April 28, 2012.

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• Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you, dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well--by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Reality, Attachment

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

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• My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own. That's not to say that all religious people are lunatics or idiots. It's anything but that.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Believe, People

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• We are free to burn the Qur’an or any other book, and to criticize Muhammad or any other human being. Let no one forget it.

  Sam Harris

  Book, Forget, Muhammad

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• We are now in the 21st century: all books, including the Koran, should be fair game for flushing down the toilet without fear of violent reprisal.

  Sam Harris

  Book, Games, Toilets

  "Bombing Our Illusions". www.huffingtonpost.com. October 10, 2005.

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• Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism. Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Intelligent, Healthy

  Sam Harris (2012). “Free Will”, p.61, Simon and Schuster

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• 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.

  Sam Harris

  Book, Government, Three

  "Religion, Terror, and Self-Transcendence". CSPAN-2, November 16, 2005.

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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.

  Sam Harris

  School, Government, United States

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.230, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Any conception of human well-being you could plausibly have, the Taliban patently fails to maximize it.

  Sam Harris

  Failing, Well Being, Wells

  "Print: Atheism's Poster Boy Sam Harris on the Science of Morality". Interview with Olivia Koski, www.wired.com. November 29, 2010.

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• According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.

  Sam Harris

  Jesus, Believe, Biblical

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• Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance.

  Sam Harris

  Ignorance, Branches, Littles

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.173, W. W. Norton & Company

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• It is time we realize that belief is not a private matter. As a man believes, so he will act. Believe that you are a member of a chosen people, awash in the salacious exports of an evil culture that is turning your children away from God, believe that you will be rewarded with an eternity of unimaginable delights by dealing death to these infidels—and flying a plane into a building is only a matter of being asked to do it.

  Sam Harris

  Children, Believe, Men

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• What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.

  Sam Harris

  Zero, Dna, One Day

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.76, W. W. Norton & Company

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• There's no way to reconcile Islam with Christianity. This difference of opinion admits of compromise as much as a coin toss does.

  Sam Harris

  Differences, Islam, Doe

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• Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches.

  Sam Harris

  Religion, Witch, Murder

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

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• The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good.

  Sam Harris

  People, Giving, Problem

  "Print: Atheism's Poster Boy Sam Harris on the Science of Morality". Interview with Olivia Koski, www.wired.com. November 29, 2010.

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• It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed (Aquinas).

  Sam Harris

  Religion, Church, Augustine

  "Letter to a Christian Nation". Book by Sam Harris, 2006.

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• If one doesn't value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?

  Sam Harris

  Logical Arguments, Should, Prove

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• You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps.

  Sam Harris

  Company, Persons

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• If Jesus does come down out of the clouds like a superhero, Christianity will stand revealed as a science . That will be the science of Christianity.

  Sam Harris

  Jesus, Clouds, Superhero

  "Religion, Terror, and Self-Transcendence". The Ethical Culture Society and the Center for Inquiry, New York, NY, Broadcast on CSPAN-2, November 16, 2005.

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• To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world - to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish - is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.

  Sam Harris

  Ignorance, Our World, Luxury

  "The End of Faith". Book by Sam Harris (pages 22-23), 2004.

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• This is how you play tennis without the net

  Sam Harris

  Play, Tennis

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• Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.

  Sam Harris

  Long, Puppets, Creeds

  Sam Harris (2012). “Free Will”, p.20, Simon and Schuster

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• Science does not limit itself merely to what is currently verifiable. But it is interested in questions that are potentially verifiable (or, rather, falsifiable).

  Sam Harris

  Doe, Limits

  "Pope ‘Rottweiler’ Barks" by Sam Harris, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 17, 2006.

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• To speak specifically of our problem with the Muslim world, we are meandering into a genuine clash of civilizations, and we're deluding ourselves with euphemisms. We're talking about Islam being a religion of peace that's been hijacked by extremists. If ever there were a religion that's not a religion of peace, it is Islam.

  Sam Harris

  Talking, Civilization, Islam

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