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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.

Sam Harris

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?
SAM HARRIS

Friendship Love Oneself Person Suffering Time World
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
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
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
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
The perpetrators of the Inquisition – the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions – were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God – popes, bishops, friars, and priests.
SAM HARRIS

Action God Information Man Oneself Torture
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.
SAM HARRIS

Civilization Cultural Faith Greatness Ourselves Problem Religious
You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.
SAM HARRIS

Decision Word Yourself
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.
SAM HARRIS

Freedom Learning Limitation Society Tolerance
If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life – you won’t enjoy any of it.
SAM HARRIS

Angry Confusion Depression Enjoyment Life Success Yourself
Science is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national, and political boundaries. You don’t have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science.
SAM HARRIS

Boundary Human Ourselves Politics Science Thinking Transcendence
False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.
SAM HARRIS

Encouragement Fake Motivational Person Purpose
Theology is ignorance with wings.
SAM HARRIS

Ignorance One Liner Wings
Words like ‘God’ and ‘Allah’ must go the way of ‘Apollo’ and ‘Baal’ or they will unmake our world.
SAM HARRIS

God Ourselves Word World
Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle.
SAM HARRIS

Atheist Live Philosophy Principle Unfortunate World
As a man believes, so he will act.
SAM HARRIS

Act Believe Himself Man

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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