Sam Harris Quotes

A wasteland of embarrassment and social upheaval can be neatly avoided by following a single precept in life: Do not lie.

I’m not denying the importance of achieving one’s goals, maintaining one’s health, or keeping one’s children clothed and fed — but most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.

Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a thelogically defensible reading of the Bible.

Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests of living in the modern world. No doubt an obscure truth of economics is at work here: societies appear to become considerably less productive whenever large numbers of people stop making widgets and begin killing their customers and creditors for heresy. The first thing to observe about the moderate's retreat from scriptural literalism is that it draws its inspiration not from scripture but from cultural developments that have rendered many of God's utterances difficult to accept as written.

The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world.

Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance. [...] By failing to live by the letter of the texts [scripture], while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.

I'm the Ted Bundy of string theory.

There are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment, most of them are Hindus, most of them therefore are polytheists. In Dr Craig's (Christian) universe, no matter how good these people are, they are doomed. If you are praying to the monkey god, Hanuman, you are doomed. You'll be tortured in hell for eternity. Now is there the slightest evidence for this? No, it just says so in Mark 9, Matthew 13 and Revelations 14. Perhaps you'll remember from The Lord of the Rings, it says that when the elves die, they go to Valinor, but they can be reborn in Middle Earth. I say that just as a point of comparison.

if you are thinking without knowing you are thinking, you are confused about who and what you are.

The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained — as the beliefs, rituals, and iconography of each of our religions attest to centuries of crosspollination among them.

It is time we recognized that the only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-minded way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts.

We live in a world of unimaginable surprises - from the fusion energy that lights the sun to the genetic and evolutionary consequences of this light’s dancing for eons upon the earth - and yet paradise conforms to our most superficial concerns with all the fidelity of a Caribbean cruise. This is wondrously strange. If one didn't know better, one would think that man, in his fear of losing all that he loves, had created heaven, along with its gatekeeper God, in his own image.

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.

Honesty is a gift we can give to others. It is also a source of power and an engine of simplicity.

This is not to say that the deepest concerns of the faithful, whether moderate or extreme, are trivial or misguided. There is no denying that most of us have emotional and spiritual needs that are now addressed — however obliquely and at a terrible price — by mainstream religion. And these are needs that a mere understanding of our world, scientific or otherwise, will never fulfill. There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions — Jesus was born of a virgin; the Koran is the word of God — for us to do this.