Top Sam Harris Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Sam Harris Biography

Sam Benjamin Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American author, philosopher, neuroscientist, blogger, and podcast host. He is a critic of religion. He concerns himself with matters that touch on spirituality, morality, neuroscience, free will, and terrorism. He is described as one of the "Four Horsemen of atheism", with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett.

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Sam Harris Quotes

Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.

Conscious, Creatures, Facts, Reduce, Values, Well Being

Death is, in some ways, unacceptable. It's just an astonishing fact of our being here that we die; but I think worse than that is if we live long enough, we lose everyone we love in this world. I mean people die and disappear, and we're left with this stark mystery: just the sheer not knowing of what happened to them.

Knowing, Long, Lose, Mean, People, Thinking

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.

Claim, Evil, Faces, Omniscient, Philosophy, Problem

The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms.

Landscape, Morality, Thinking, Use

We can either have a twenty-first-century conversation about morality and the human well-being - a conversation in which we avail ourselves of all scientific insights and philosophical arguments that have accumulated in the last two thousand years of human discourse - or we can confine ourselves to a first-century conversation as it is preserved in the Bible.

Arguments, Confine, Philosophical, Scientific, Two, Years

Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts.

Foods, Like Love, Loneliness, Pleasure, Specific, Thinking

That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization.

Civilization, Global, Greatest, Past, Possibility, Religion

In my own case, the most inflammatory statements I have ever made are ones that I have written and remain willing to defend.

Cases, Made, Ones, Willing, Written

I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror.

Ethical, May, People, Print, War

Our moral reasoning is plagued by two illusions. The first illusion can be called the wag-the-dog illusion: We believe that our own moral judgment (the dog) is driven by our own moral reasoning (the tail). The second illusion can be called the wag-theother-dog's-tail illusion: In a moral argument, we expect the successful rebuttal of an opponent's arguments to change the opponent's mind. Such a belief is like thinking that forcing a dog's tail to wag by moving it with your hand will make the dog happy.

Atheist, Believe, Dog, Reasoning, Rebuttal, Tail

Human experience depends on everything that can influence states of the human brain, ranging from changes in our genome to changes in the global economy.

Brain, Changes, Economy, Everything, Influence, Ranging

We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas

Blood, Bottom, Continue, Ideas, Spill, War

Take a moment to reflect upon the existence of the musical The Book of Mormon. Now imagine the security precautions that would be required to stage a similar production about Islam. The project is unimaginable—not only in Beirut, Baghdad, or Jerusalem, but in New York City.

New York, Book, Cities, Baghdad, Required, Musical

Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe.

Believe, Easy, Effort, Thinking

What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about 'right' and 'wrong,' or 'good' and 'evil,' and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?

Evil, Lose, Our World, Worry

To speak specifically of our problem with the Muslim world, we are meandering into a genuine clash of civilizations, and we're deluding ourselves with euphemisms. We're talking about Islam being a religion of peace that's been hijacked by extremists. If ever there were a religion that's not a religion of peace, it is Islam.

Talking, Civilization, Islam, Problem, Speak, Euphemisms

The wealthiest Americans often live as though they and their children had nothing to gain from investments in education, infrastructure, clean-energy, and scientific research.

Americans, Children, Energy, Live, Nothing, Research

It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Hurricane Katrina struck shared your belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and compassionate God. But what was God doing while Katrina laid waste to their city? Surely He heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there.

Belief, Cities, Drowned, Men, Prayer, Struck

Many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of 'spirituality' or 'mysticism' to be synonymous with mental illness, conscious fraud, or self-deception. I have argued elsewhere that this is a problem - because millions of people have had experiences for which 'spiritual' and 'mystical' seem the only terms available.

Atheist, Mystical, Mysticism, People, Self, Spiritual

Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance.

Branches, Human, Ignorance, Littles, Theology

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