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 HARRISWhen the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don’t believe as you do.
More Sam Harris Quotes
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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.
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Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.
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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.
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If premarital sex is a sin, who is the victim?
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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?
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Islam, at the moment, is the motherlode of bad ideas.
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Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.
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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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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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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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Muslims must learn that if they make belligerent and fanatical claims upon the tolerance of free societies, they will meet the limits of that tolerance.
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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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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.
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Jesus Christ—who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens—can now be eaten in the form of a cracker
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Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.
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From my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings.
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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.
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Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.
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I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.
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We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That’s it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper.
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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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It is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience.
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I’m the Ted Bundy of string theory.
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Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.
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We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.
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When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don’t believe as you do.
SAM HARRIS