Sam Harris Quotes

Is it possible to be happy before anything happens, before one’s desires are gratified, in spite of life’s difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death?

We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.

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.

Few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems. Within a religious framework, a belief in free will supports the notion of sin — which seems to justify not only harsh punishment in this life but eternal punishment in the next. And yet, ironically, one of the fears attending our progress in science is that a more complete understanding of ourselves will dehumanize us.

The moment one begins thinking about morality in terms of well-being, it becomes remarkably easy to discern a moral hierarchy across human societies.

The U.S. Supreme Court has called free will a “universal and persistent” foundation for our system of law, distinct from “a deterministic view of human conduct that is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system” (United States v. Grayson, 1978).

invidious comparisons of this kind is to stand convicted of bigotry.

No atrocity was ever committed because people were being too reasonable, too skeptical, or too independently minded.

In fact, beginning meditators often think that they are able to concentrate on a single object, such as the breath, for minutes at a time, only to report after days or weeks of intensive practice that their attention is now carried away by thought every few seconds. This is actually progress. It takes a certain degree of concentration to even notice how distracted you are. Even if your life depended on it, you could not spend a full minute free of thought.

Luckily, this shame is not indelible and can be readily expunged with her blood.

We must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it.

It would not be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life. And yet the change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward. I was simply talking to my friend — about what, I don’t recall — and realized that I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer anxious, self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of thought or attention that separated me from him. I was no longer watching myself through another person’s eyes.

If my brain were surgically divided by callosotomy tomorrow, this would create at least two independent conscious minds, both of which would be psychologically continuous with the person who is now writing this paragraph. If my linguistic abilities happened to be distributed across both hemispheres, each of these minds might remember having written this sentence. The question of whether I would land in the left hemisphere or the right doesn’t make sense — being based, as it is, on the illusion that there is a self bobbing on the stream of consciousness

It is time we realized that crimes without victims are like debts without creditors. They do not even exist.

People of faith tend to argue that it is not faith itself but man's baser nature that inspires such violence. But, I take it to be self-evident that ordinary people cannot be moved to burn genial old scholars alive for blaspheming the Koran, or celebrate the violent deaths of their children, unless they believe some improbable things about the nature of the universe.