Famous Quotes & Sayings

Sam Harris Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Sam Harris.

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Famous Quotes By Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 1843793

What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives. — Sam Harris

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Criticizing a person's ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not. — Sam Harris

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It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology. To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview-however heroic the efforts of redactors- is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture. We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself. — Sam Harris

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Although many things can be said in criticism of religious faith, there is no discounting its power. Millions among us, even now, are quite willing to die for our unjustified beliefs, and millions more, it seems, are willing to kill for them. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 1965563

I think there are universal principles that we should want to understand, but that are not necessarily good for us. We could recognise universal propensities which current cultures can't fully eradicate, which we would want to eradicate if we could. Let's say, a tendency for tribal violence. Or racism. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 1615162

Religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty ... exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the ... false to achieve primacy over the facts. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 1164499

In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist." We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 1656127

I want those in what I call the regressive left who are reading this exchange to understand that the first stage in the empowerment of any minority community is the liberation of reformist voices within that community so that its members can take responsibility for themselves and overcome the first hurdle to genuine empowerment: the victimhood mentality. This is what the American civil rights movement achieved, by shifting the debate. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders took responsibility for their own communities and acted in a positive and empowering way, instead of constantly playing the victim card or rioting in the streets. Perpetuating this groupthink mind-set is both extremely dangerous and in fact disempowering. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 1596546

There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad ... To produce this horrible confection at home, start with our genocidal treatment of the Native Americans, add a couple hundred years of slavery, along with our denial of entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the death camps of the Third Reich, stir in our collusion with a long list of modern despots and our subsequent disregard for their appalling human rights records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers to taste, and then top with our recent refusals to sign the Kyoto protocol for greenhouse emissions, to support any ban on land mines, and to submit ourselves to the rulings of the International Criminal Court. The result should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 547261

is one thing to say that you are unaware of a vast amount of activity in your brain. It is quite another to say that some of this activity is aware of itself and is watching your every move. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 2149232

Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worthy of punishment ... And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good ... This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics. — Sam Harris

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If we could popularize the understanding that all conclusions from scripture are but interpretations, then all variant readings of a holy book would become a matter of differing human perspectives. That — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 1472325

There is almost nothing more common than the belief that one is above average in intelligence, wisdom, honesty, etc. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 2213383

You almost never get the pleasure of seeing that you won the argument in real time. People just don't like to publicly change their minds. They change their minds in private. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 816698

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. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 1893709

Jesus Christ - who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens - can now be eaten in the form of a cracker — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 437402

Speaking from personal experience, I think that losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics - by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck. Is — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 1068256

Whatever their conscious motives, these men cannot know why they are as they are. As sickening as I find their behavior, I have to admit that if I were to trade places with one of these men, atom for atom, I would be him: There is no extra part of me that could decide to see the world differently or to resist the impulse to victimize other people. Even if you believe that every human being harbors an immortal soul, the problem of responsibility remains: I cannot take credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of psychopath. If I had truly been in Komisarjevsky's shoes on July 23,2007 - that is, if I had his genes and life experience and identical brain (or soul) in an identical state - I would have acted exactly as he did. There is simply no intellectually respectable position from which to deny this. — Sam Harris

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People have been cherry-picking the Bible for millennia to justify their every impulse, moral and otherwise. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 1750397

The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you. — Sam Harris

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It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 2095495

The most transformative experiences people have - bliss, devotion, self transcendence - are currently anchored to the worst parts of culture and to ways of thinking that merely amplify superstition, self-deception, and conflict. — Sam Harris

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I think it would be extremely helpful if people focused on the ideas being discussed here, rather than on calling you names - which is an easy way to ignore your ideas. — Sam Harris

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

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Anyone being flown to a distant city for heart-bypass surgery has conceded, tacitly at least, that we have learned a few things about physics, geography, engineering, and medicine since the time of Moses. — Sam Harris

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That was the moment we understood that things can go terribly wrong in our world - not because life is unfair or moral progress impossible but because we have failed, generation after generation, to abolish the delusions and animosities of our ignorant ancestors. — Sam Harris

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Indeed, what is startling about the notion of a victimless crime is that even when the behavior in question is genuinely victimless, its criminality is still affirmed by those who are eager to punish it. It is in such cases that the true genius lurking behind many of our laws stands revealed. The idea of a victimless crime is nothing more than a judicial reprise of the Christian notion of sin. — Sam Harris

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You are using your own moral intuitions to authenticate the wisdom of the Bible - and then, in the next moment, you assert that we human beings cannot possibly rely upon our own intuitions to rightly guide us in the world. — Sam Harris

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Choosing beliefs freely is not what rational minds do. — Sam Harris

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While we may never achieve closure in our view of the world, it seems extraordinarily likely that our descendants will look upon many of our beliefs as both impossibly quaint and suicidally stupid. — Sam Harris

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Of course, there can be clear indications that a teacher is not worth paying attention to. A history as a fabulist or a con artist should be considered fatal; thus, the spiritual opinions of Joseph Smith, Gurdjieff, and L. Ron Hubbard can be safely ignored. A fetish for numbers is also an ominous sign. Math is magical, but math approached like magic is just superstition - and numerology is where the intellect goes to die. Prophecy is also a very strong indication of chicanery or madness on the part of a teacher, and of stupidity among his students. One can extrapolate from scientific data or technological trends (climate models, Moore's law), but most detailed predictions about the future lead to embarrassment right on schedule. — Sam Harris

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While the stoning of children for heresy has fallen out of fashion in our country, you will not hear a moderate Christian or Jew arguing for a "symbolic" reading of passages of this sort. [ ... ] it is only by ignoring such barbarisms that the Good Book can be reconciled with life in the modern world. This is a problem for "moderation" in religion: it has nothing underwriting it other than the unacknowledged neglect of the letter of the divine law. — Sam Harris

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As manuals for contemplative understanding, the Bible and the Koran are worse than useless. Whatever wisdom can be found in their pages is never best found there, and it is subverted, time and again, by ancient savagery and superstition. — Sam Harris

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It seems profoundly unlikely that our universe has been designed to reward individual primates for killing one another while believing in the divine origin of a specific book. — Sam Harris

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And just as some people have obvious moral deficits, others must possess moral talent, moral expertise, and even moral genius. As with any human ability, these gradations must be expressed at the level of the brain. Game — Sam Harris

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Many scientists have been drawn to Buddhism out of a sense that the Western tradition has delivered an impoverished conception of basic, human sanity. In the West, if you speak to yourself out loud all day long, you are considered crazy. But speaking to yourself silently - thinking incessantly - is considered perfectly normal. — Sam Harris

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Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: — Sam Harris

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To agree to keep a secret is to assume a burden — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 2146325

One must be able to pay attention closely enough to glimpse what consciousness is like between thoughts - that is, prior to the arising of the next one. Consciousness does not feel like a self. Once one realizes this, the status of thoughts themselves, as transient expressions of consciousness, can be understood. — Sam Harris

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Could there be any doubt that the Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again, knowing that his body was now readily accessible in the form of defenseless crackers? — Sam Harris

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Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral - that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings. This explains why Christians like yourself expend more "moral" energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide. It explains why you are more concerned about human embryos than about the lifesaving promise of stem-cell research. And it explains why you can preach against condom use in sub-Saharan Africa while millions die from AIDS there each year. — Sam Harris

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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. — Sam Harris

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Thoughts themselves are not a problem, but being identified with thought is. — Sam Harris

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How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives. — Sam Harris

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In the best case, notions of God's love and grace provide some relief - but the central message of these faiths is that each of us is separate from, and in relationship to, a divine authority who will punish anyone who harbors the slightest doubt about His supremacy. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 1683872

Harris Very interesting. So when we talk about a phenomenon like honor killing, we're not just worried about Islamists; we're worried about how the average conservative Muslim man will treat his wife or daughter in light of his religious beliefs and cultural values. And yet many of these conservatives may be opponents of Islamism. Nawaz Yes. Conservative Muslims can be very useful as allies against Islamism and jihadism, but they may oppose you on gender rights and equality and, in some cases, honor killings. — Sam Harris

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It is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 1928862

Over one million people died in the orgy of religious killing that attended the partitioning of India and Pakistan. The two countries have since fought three official wars, suffered a continuous bloodletting at their shared border, and are now poised to exterminate one another with nuclear weapons simply because they disagree about "facts" that are every bit as fanciful as the names of Santa's reindeer. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 1911378

While they rightly question every aspect of their "own" Western culture in the name of progress, they censure liberal Muslims who attempt to do so within Islam, and they choose to side instead with every regressive reactionary in the name of "cultural authenticity" and anticolonialism. — Sam Harris

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It's simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 2259714

Some pleasures are intrinsically ethical - feelings like love, gratitude, devotion, and compassion. To inhabit these states of mind is, by definition, to be brought into alignment with others. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 1817831

The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention - distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence - is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity - a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible. — Sam Harris

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About 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent deity. — Sam Harris

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Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities. Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy. — Sam Harris

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The power of psychedelics ... is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime. — Sam Harris

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If we cannot find our way to a time when most of us are willing to admit that, at the very least, we are not sure whether or not God wrote some of our books, then we need only count the days to Armageddon - because God has given us far many more reasons to kill one another than to turn the other cheek. — Sam Harris

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We are being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude ... it is psychopathic because this is a total detachment from the, from the well-being of human beings. It, this so easily rationalizes the slaughter of children. Ok, just think about the Muslims at this moment who are blowing themselves up, convinced that they are agents of God's will. There is absolutely nothing that Dr. Craig can s - can say against their behavior, in moral terms, apart from his own faith-based claim that they're praying to the wrong God. If they had the right God, what they were doing would be good, on Divine Command theory.
Now, I'm obviously not saying that all that Dr. Craig, or all religious people, are psychopaths and psychotics, but this to me is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own. — Sam Harris

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While liberals are leery of religious fundamentalism in general, they consistently imagine that all religions at their core teach the same thing and teach it equally well. This is one of the many delusions borne of political correctness. — Sam Harris

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In adaptive terms, belief has been extraordinarily useful. It is, after all, by believing various propositions about the world that we predict events and consider the likely consequences of our actions. Beliefs are principles of action: whatever they may be at the level of the brain, they are processes by which our understanding (and misunderstanding) of the world is represented and made available to guide our behavior. — Sam Harris

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The urge for retribution, therefore, seems to depend upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior. Despite — Sam Harris

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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. — Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris Quotes 438446

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. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 418431

Consider what it would take to actually have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions, and you would need to have complete control over those factors. — Sam Harris

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Consciousness is the basis of both the examined and the unexamined life. — Sam Harris

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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. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 339242

Now, as to the view that this is how anyone who had suffered imperialism or colonialism would behave: no, it's not. Entire countries such as India, were colonized. There's a difference between what's happening in Iraq with the so-called Islamic State's attempted genocide of the Yazidi community and how Gandhi acted in India. Let's take Iraq as a case study and think about it: What does killing the Yazidi population on Mount Sinjar have to do with US foreign policy? What does enforcing headscarves (tents, in fact) on women in Waziristan and Afghanistan, and lashing them, forcing men to grow beards under threat of a whip, chopping off hands, and so forth, have to do with US foreign policy? — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 631131

One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 275784

... if we lost all our hard-won knowledge and all our archives, and all our ethics and morals, in some Marquez-like fit of collective amnesia, and had to reconstruct everything essential from scratch, it is difficult to imagine at what point we would need to remind or reassure ourselves that Jesus was born of a virgin. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 274623

False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 274173

Am I identical to my skin? If not - and the answer is clearly no - why should the frontier between my outside and my inside be drawn at the skin? If not at the skin, then where does the outside of me stop and the inside of me begin? At my skull? Am I my skull? Am I inside my skull? Let's say yes for the moment, because we are quickly running out of places to look for me. Where inside my skull might I be? And if I'm up there in my head, how is the rest of me me (let alone the inside of me)? — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 269448

In my experience with print journalists, the distinction between remarks being uttered on- or off-the-record is held sacrosanct, but the distinction between truth and falsity sometimes isn't. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 228972

Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain
from cosmology to psychology to economics
has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.
Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 155913

My friend Joseph Goldstein, one of the finest vipassana teachers I know, likens this shift in awareness to the experience of being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you are sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall. — Sam Harris

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When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives - about how they appear, their reputations, or their prospects in the world. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 134465

Consciousness is the prior condition of every experience; the self or ego is an illusory appearance within it; look closely for what you are calling "I," and the feeling of being a separate self will disappear; what remains, as a matter of experience, is a field of consciousness - free, undivided, and intrinsically uncontaminated by its ever-changing contents. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 133884

The bigots, whether they are of the Islamist variety or the anti-Muslim variety, essentially agree on a few matters. One is their belief that Islam itself - not Islamism - is a supremacist ideology that is here to take over the world; another is that, therefore, Muslims and non-Muslims can never live equally and peacefully together, but must separate into religiously defined entities. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 107487

Nothing that a Christian and a Muslim can say to each other will render their beliefs mutually vulnerable to discourse, because the very tenets of their faith have immunized them against the power of conversation. Believing strongly, without evidence, they have kicked themselves loose of the world. It is therefore in the very nature of faith to serve as an impediment to further inquiry. — Sam Harris

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Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork, — Sam Harris

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It is difficult to think of anything more important than providing the best education possible for our children. They will develop the next technologies, medical cures, and global industries, while mitigating their unintended effects, or they will fail to do these things and consign us all to oblivion. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 1302987

In my experience, some Dzogchen masters are better teachers than others. I have been in the presence of several of the most revered Tibetan lamas of our time while they were ostensibly teaching Dzogchen, and most of them simply described this view of consciousness without giving clear instructions on how to glimpse it. The genius of Tulku Urgyen was that he could point out the nature of mind with the precision and matter-of-factness of teaching a person how to thread a needle and could get an ordinary meditator like me to recognize that consciousness is intrinsically free of self. There might be some initial struggle and uncertainty, depending on the student, but once the truth of nonduality had been glimpsed, it became obvious that it was always available - and there was never any doubt about how to see it again. I came to Tulku Urgyen yearning for the experience of self-transcendence, and in a few minutes he showed me that I had no self to transcend. — Sam Harris

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Anyone familiar with my work knows that I am extremely critical of all religious faiths. — Sam Harris

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

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A person who believes that Elvis is still alive is very unlikely to get promoted to a position of great power and responsibility in our society. Neither will a person who believes that the holocaust was a hoax. But people who believe equally irrational things about God and the bible are now running our country. This is genuinely terrifying. — Sam Harris

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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? — Sam Harris

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Our system of justice should reflect an understanding that any of us could have been dealt a very different hand in life. In fact, it seems immoral not to recognize just how much luck is involved in morality itself. — Sam Harris

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Worrying about inciting racial hatred in cartoons is legitimate, so that no group is racially targeted. It is why we don't like anti-Semitic cartoons. This is entirely distinct from a "blasphemy" motivation for censorship, which aims to silence scrutiny of a powerful idea and its founder, inspiring to billions. We must not confuse these two different concerns. This is the core of what most of us, especially Muslims, must reflect on in the wake of the tragedy in France. — Sam Harris

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We have barely emerged from centuries of barbarism. It's not a surprise that there are shocking inequities in this world. It is hard work to climb down out of the trees and walk upright,and build a viable global civilization when you start with technology that is made of rocks and sticks and fur. This is a project, and progress is dificult. — Sam Harris

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It is always now. — Sam Harris

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Unreason is now ascendant in the United States in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution ; 68 percent believe in Satan . Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world . — Sam Harris

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One thing each of us knows for certain is that reality vastly exceeds our awareness of it. — Sam Harris

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Well, that's a very interesting question," he said - to which he had no interesting or even sane answer. He simply conceded that if the Messiah came back and reconvened the Sanhedrin, well, then, yes - though mere mortals like ourselves might not see the wisdom of it - homosexuals, adulteresses, witches, and Sabbath breakers would be killed, and every other barbaric prescription found in the Old Testament would apply. As I was contemplating where on his person I should aim my vomit, he managed this final defense of his religion: "You just don't understand what an obscenity - what a sacrilege - these things would represent in the presence of the Messiah — Sam Harris

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If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have ... a recipe for the fall of civilization. — Sam Harris

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Primarily, that means learning to recognize thoughts as thoughts - as transient appearances in consciousness - and to no longer be distracted by them, if only for short periods of time. — Sam Harris

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It should go without saying that these rival belief systems [Judaism, Islam, Christianity] are all equally uncontaminated by evidence. — Sam Harris

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Advance warning of Katrina's path was wrested from mute Nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God told no one of His plans. Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence ofGod,they wouldn't have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces. And yet, as will come as no surprise to you, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that 80 percent of Katrina's survivors claim that the event only strengthened their faith in God. — Sam Harris

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There is no reason whatsoever to think that Buddhism can compete successfully with the relentless evangelizing of Christianity and Islam. Nor should it try to. — Sam Harris

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The treatment of women in Muslim communities throughout the world is unconscionable. All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the Earth. — Sam Harris

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Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn't care to, or he doesn't exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.
The only sense to make of tragedies like this is that terrible things can happen to perfectly innocent people. This understanding inspires compassion.
Religious faith, on the other hand, erodes compassion. Thoughts like, 'this might be all part of God's plan,' or 'there are no accidents in life,' or 'everyone on some level gets what he or she deserves' - these ideas are not only stupid, they are extraordinarily callous. They are nothing more than a childish refusal to connect with the suffering of other human beings. It is time to grow up and let our hearts break at moments like this. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes 823869

There is nothing passive about mindfulness. One might even say that it expresses a specific kind of passion - a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. It is a mode of cognition that is, above all, undistracted, accepting, and (ultimately) nonconceptual. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. Mindfulness is a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one's mind or body - thoughts, sensations, moods - without grasping at the pleasant or recoiling from the unpleasant. — Sam Harris