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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.

Sam Harris

What I’m asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.
SAM HARRIS

Believe Deep Entertainment Ethics Live Spiritual
Religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the false to achieve primacy over the facts.
SAM HARRIS

Achievement Fact Faith Fake Religious Uncertain
George Bush says he speaks to god every day, & Christians love him for it. If George Bush said he spoke to god through his hair dryer, they would think he was mad. I fail to see how the addition of a hair dryer makes it any more absurd.
SAM HARRIS

Failure Religion
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.
SAM HARRIS

Faith Ourselves People Reason Religious Time
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.
SAM HARRIS

Argument Evidence Honesty Science
It is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience.
SAM HARRIS

Book Ordinary Product Value
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 HARRIS

Activity Education Fast Man Survive Woman World
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.
SAM HARRIS

Definition Lying Relationship Trust Understand
If premarital sex is a sin, who is the victim?
SAM HARRIS

Sex Victim
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.
SAM HARRIS

Believe Ourselves Perfection Religion True
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

Argument Evidence Logic Prove Value Yourself
From my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings.
SAM HARRIS

Freedom Love Point View
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.
SAM HARRIS

Abusive God Kill People Name Oppression Reading
Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.
SAM HARRIS

Knowledge Ourselves Reason Science
The only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.
SAM HARRIS

Collaboration End Evidence Human Open Ourselves Security World
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.
SAM HARRIS

Life Power Reveal Science Time Understand

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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