Sam Harris Quotes

But it can be liberating to see how thoughts pull the levers of emotion — and how negative emotions in turn set the stage for patterns of thinking that keep them active and coloring one’s mind.

In addition to demanding that we fulfill every “jot” and “tittle” of Old Testament law,7 Jesus seems to have suggested, in John 15:6, further refinements to the practice of killing heretics and unbelievers: “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.” Whether we want to interpret Jesus metaphorically is, of course, our business. The problem with scripture, however, is that many of its possible interpretations (including most of the literal ones) can be used to justify atrocities in defense of the faith.

Our interests in life are not always served by viewing people and things as collections of atoms — but this doesn’t negate the truth or utility of physics.

"Nothing in Chomsky's account acknowledges the difference between intending to kill a child, because of the effect you hope to produce on its parents (we call this "terrorism"), and inadvertently killing a child in an attempt to capture or kill an avowed child murderer (we call this "collateral damage"). In both cases a child has died, and in both cases it is a tragedy. But the ethical status of the perpetrators, be they individuals or states, could not be more distinct... For Chomsky, intentions do not seem to matter. Body count is all."

"Consciousness is already free of everything that remotely resembles a self".

Interestingly, when one functions in this mode, one quickly recognizes all the other people who are playing the same game. I had many encounters wherein I would meet the eyes of a person across the room, and suddenly we were playing War of the Warlocks: two strangers holding each other’s gaze well past the point that our primate genes or cultural conditioning would ordinarily countenance. Play this game long enough and you begin to have some very strange encounters.

It makes no sense at all to have the most important features of our lives anchored to divisive claims about the unique sanctity of ancient books or to rumors of ancient miracles.

What is the meaning of life? What is our purpose on earth? These are some of the great, false questions of religion. We need not answer them, for they are badly posed, but we can live our answers all the same. At a minimum, we can create the conditions for human flourishing in this life — the only life of which any of us can be certain. That means we should not terrify our children with thoughts of hell or poison them with hatred for infidels. We should not teach our sons to consider women their future property or convince our daughters that they are property even now. And we must decline to tell our children that human history began with bloody magic and will end with bloody magic in a glorious war between the righteous and the rest.

The problem I want to talk to you about tonight is the problem of belief. What does it mean to believe? We use this word all the time, and I think behind it lurk some really extraordinary taboos and confusions. What I want to argue tonight is that how we talk about belief- how we fail to criticize or criticize the beliefs of others, has more importance to us personally, more consequence to us personally and to civilization than perhaps anything else that is in our power to influence.

It is therefore not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves- socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically.

Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse — constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor.

You don't get anything worth getting by pretending to know things you don’t know.

To agree to keep a secret is to assume a burden

Over one million people died in the orgy of religious killing that attended the partitioning of India and Pakistan. The two countries have since fought three official wars, suffered a continuous bloodletting at their shared border, and are now poised to exterminate one another with nuclear weapons simply because they disagree about “facts” that are every bit as fanciful as the names of Santa’s reindeer.

The problem is that most people, most of the time, are desperate to believe ridiculous and divisive ideas for patently emotional reasons,and while rarely explicit what they're really worried about is death