Sam Harris Quotes

Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected.

there is no impediment to our studying subjective (i.e., first-person) facts “objectively.

Among the many paradoxes of human life, this is perhaps the most peculiar and consequential: We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy.

ONE OF THE most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering.

Becoming sensitive to the background causes of one's thoughts and feelings can — paradoxically — allow for greater creative control over one's life. It is one thing to bicker with your wife because you are in a bad mood; it is another to realize that your mood and behavior have been caused by low blood sugar. This understanding reveals you to be a biochemical puppet, of course, but it also allows you to grab hold of one of your strings: A bit of food may be all that your personality requires. Getting behind our concious thoughts and feelings can allow us to steer a more intelligent course through our lives (while knowing, of course, that we are ultimately being steered).

Everything we want to accomplish — to paint the house, learn a new language, find a better job — is something that promises that, if done, it would allow us to finally relax and enjoy our lives in the present. Generally speaking, this is a false hope.

"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."

If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, then some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlightened than others; and some world views will be mistaken in ways that cause needless human misery.

the defense one most often hears for belief in God is not that there is compelling evidence for His existence, but that faith in Him is the only reliable source of meaning and moral guidance.

A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny, and you might observe that you no more decide the next thought you think than the next thought I write.

Even when we think we are in the present moment we are in very subtle ways looking over its shoulder anticipating what's coming next. We're always solving a problem. And it's possible to simply drop your problem, if only for a moment, and enjoy whatever is true of your life in the present... This is not a matter of new information or more information. It requires a change in attitude. It requires a change in the attentiveness you pay to your experience in the present moment.

Why should we live in relationship to ourselves rather than merely as ourselves?

If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion. I think more people are dying as a result of our religious myths than as a result of any other ideology. I would not say that all human conflict is born of religion or religious differences, but for the human community to be fractured on the basis of religious doctrines that are fundamentally incompatible, in an age when nuclear weapons are proliferating, is a terrifying scenario.

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.

My friend the musician and playwright Baba Brinkman — whom I worked with on The Rap Guide to Consciousness — put it beautifully: “What we call reality is just when we all agree about our hallucinations.