Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.
SAM HARRISIt 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.
More Sam Harris Quotes
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You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.
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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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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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False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.
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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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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?
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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.
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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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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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We know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.
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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 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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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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Atheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations.
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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.
SAM HARRIS