Sam Harris Quotes

What makes me a scientist is that I’d much rather have questions I can’t answer than answers I can’t question.

F. Zeidan et al. 2011. “Brain Mechanisms Supporting the Modulation of Pain by Mindfulness Meditation.” Pain 31: 5540–48; B. K. Holzel et al. 2011. “How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action from a Conceptual

We might also wonder, in passing, which is more moral: helping people purely out of concern for their suffering, or helping them because you think the creator of the universe will reward you for it?

Harris: Yes. In fact, self-deception might have paid evolutionary dividends in other ways. Robert Trivers argues, for instance, that people who can believe their own lies turn out to be the best liars of all — and an ability to deceive rivals has obvious advantages in the state of nature. Now, clearly many things may have been adaptive for our ancestors — such as tribal warfare, rape, xenophobia — that we now deem unethical and would never want to defend. But I’m wondering if you see any possibility that a social system that maximizes truth-telling could be one that fails to maximize the well-being of all participants. Is it possible that some measure of deception is good for us?

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

When I took to Twitter and I urged Hillary to speak clearly on this topic [Islamic terrorism, following the Orlando shootings in June 2016], I got attacked by even LGBT activists for my bigotry, for inspiring hate against Muslims. This is how confused the left is: just a few hours after this news broke, LGBT activists were so allergic to having someone name the belief system that had just produced a massacre in their community that they lashed out against me as a bigot rather than lash out against the people who won't name the belief system that at this moment is doing more than any other on earth to target gays and to force them into hiding.

We are not self-caused little gods.

According to the Buddhist teachings, human beings have a distorted view of reality that leads them to suffer unnecessarily. We grasp at transitory pleasures. We brood about the past and worry about the future. We continually seek to prop up and defend an egoic self that doesn’t exist. This is stressful — and spiritual life is a process of gradually unraveling our confusion and bringing this stress to an end. According to the Buddhist view, by seeing things as they are, we cease to suffer in the usual ways, and our minds can open to states of well-being that are intrinsic to the nature of consciousness.

Countries with high levels of atheism are also the most charitable both in terms of the percentage of their wealth they devote to social welfare programs and the percentage they give in aid to the developing world. The dubious link between Christian literalism and Christian values is belied by other indices of social equality. Consider the ratio of salaries paid to top-tier CEOs and those paid to the same firms’ average employees: in Britain it is 24:1; in France, 15:1; in Sweden, 13:1; in the United States, where 80 percent of the population expects to be called before God on Judgment Day, it is 475:1. Many a camel, it would seem, expects to pass easily through the eye of a needle.

If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?

Most people who believe they are meditating are merely thinking with their eyes closed.

There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life.

Imagine what it would be like for our descendants to experience the fall of civilization. Imagine failures of reasonableness so total that our largest bombs finally fall upon our largest cities in defense of our religious differences. What would it be like for the unlucky survivors of such a holocaust to look back upon the hurtling career of human stupidity that led them over the precipice? A view from the end of the world would surely find that the six billion of us currently alive did much to pave the way to the Apocalypse.

Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherents, were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia ago; for there is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal existence of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas.

Most people in positions of leadership in our country will say that there is no direct link between the Muslim faith and “terrorism.” It is clear, however, that Muslims hate the West in the very terms of their faith and that the Koran mandates such hatred.