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You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.

Sam Harris

As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population.
SAM HARRIS

Atheist Live Myself Offend Population Society
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
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.
SAM HARRIS

Alone Believe Criticism People Problem Religion
Most of us are wiser than we may appear to be. On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow ones own advice.
SAM HARRIS

Advice Appearance Level Oneself Wisdom
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
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
Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.
SAM HARRIS

Atheist Noise Reason Religion
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.
SAM HARRIS

Atheist Care Existence God Imagination Stop Wisdom Yourself
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.
SAM HARRIS

Believe Creation Earth Invention Science
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
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.
SAM HARRIS

Believe Build Heaven Intellectual Person
An average Christian, in an average church, listen to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse — and there have been some extraordinary arrogant scientists.
SAM HARRIS

Arrogance Church
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

Action Belief Potential Privacy Time
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.
SAM HARRIS

Different Live Myself Simplicity Universe
Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.
SAM HARRIS

Correct Faith Human Ignorance Possible Religious
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

You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.

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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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