You don’t get anything worth getting, by pretending to know things you don’t know.
SAM HARRISHow we pay attention to the present moment…determin es the character of our experience and…the quality of our lives.
More Sam Harris Quotes
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Islam, at the moment, is the motherlode of bad ideas.
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A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.
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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.
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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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How we pay attention to the present moment…determin es the character of our experience and…the quality of our lives.
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This 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.
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Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.
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The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms.
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How can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t.
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We are all prisoners of our thoughts.
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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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Theology is ignorance with wings.
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Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.
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From my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings.
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If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?
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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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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.
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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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Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.
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The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.
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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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To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say that I would have lived in a different universe had I been in a different universe.
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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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You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.
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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.
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The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.
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