Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education.
SAM HARRISThe point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.
More Sam Harris Quotes
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When someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we’re told that? God is mysterious.
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The freedom to think out loud on certain topics, without fear of being hounded into hiding or killed, has already been lost.
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Islam, at the moment, is the motherlode of bad ideas.
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Atheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations.
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The problem with religion, because it’s been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.
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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.
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Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.
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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.
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Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.
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Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.
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An average Christian, in an average church, listen to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse — and there have been some extraordinary arrogant scientists.
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It’s simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.
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It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.
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The core of science is not a mathematical modeling–it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.
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People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.
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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.
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You don’t get anything worth getting, by pretending to know things you don’t know.
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I’m the Ted Bundy of string theory.
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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.
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Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.
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Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.
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When considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn’t. Religion is one area of our lives where people imagine that some other standard of intellectual integrity applies.
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Muslims must learn that if they make belligerent and fanatical claims upon the tolerance of free societies, they will meet the limits of that tolerance.
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Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.
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The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.
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As a man believes, so he will act.
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