Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.
SAM HARRISI know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.
More Sam Harris Quotes
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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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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.
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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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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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In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise.
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Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.
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A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.
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Words like ‘God’ and ‘Allah’ must go the way of ‘Apollo’ and ‘Baal’ or they will unmake our world.
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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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It is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience.
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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.
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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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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 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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Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a thelogically defensible reading of the Bible.
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We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.
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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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It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
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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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The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.
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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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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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We are all prisoners of our thoughts.
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Atheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations.
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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.
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It is time we recognized that belief is not a private matter; it has never been merely private. In fact, beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is a fount of action in potential.
SAM HARRIS