black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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?

Sam Harris

It is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.
SAM HARRIS

Belief Difficult Heart Imagination Lying Mental Religious Tradition
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.
SAM HARRIS

Conscience Freedom Ourselves
Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.
SAM HARRIS

Creature Fact Reduce Value
Faith enables many of us to endure life’s difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason.
SAM HARRIS

Difficult Endurance Faith Life Reason
The habit of spending nearly every waking moment lost in thought leaves us at the mercy of whatever our thoughts happen to be. Meditation is a way of breaking this spell.
SAM HARRIS

Habit Mercy Moments Ourselves Wake Up
You don’t get anything worth getting, by pretending to know things you don’t know.
SAM HARRIS

Pretend Worth Yourself
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

Community Face Islam Kill Muslim Religion Yourself
It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
SAM HARRIS

Intellectual Public Reason Science Time
Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?
SAM HARRIS

Friendship Love Oneself Person Suffering Time World
People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.
SAM HARRIS

Evidence Hall Ourselves People Power Society Strong
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

Argument Change Happiness Privacy Yourself
Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.
SAM HARRIS

Fact Reality Statement Work
The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia ago-and who seems to have abandoned them to bloodshed in his name ever since-is no one to consult on questions of ethics.
SAM HARRIS

Abandonment Desert Ethics Question
It is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world.
SAM HARRIS

Open Ourselves Time World
You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.
SAM HARRIS

Control Lost Storm Yourself
I’m the Ted Bundy of string theory.
SAM HARRIS

String Theory

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?

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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?

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Sam Harris Quotes