We are all prisoners of our thoughts.
SAM HARRISWe are all prisoners of our thoughts.
SAM HARRISWords like ‘God’ and ‘Allah’ must go the way of ‘Apollo’ and ‘Baal’ or they will unmake our world.
SAM HARRISGeorge 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 HARRISScience 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 HARRISYou can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.
SAM HARRISFrom my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings.
SAM HARRISYou are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.
SAM HARRISYou don’t get anything worth getting, by pretending to know things you don’t know.
SAM HARRISAtheism 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 HARRISThe fact that my continuous and public rejection of Christianity does not worry me in the least should suggest to you just how inadequate I think your reasons for being a Christian are.
SAM HARRISWe 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.
SAM HARRISThe problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.
SAM HARRISSome propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.
SAM HARRISLying 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 HARRISAs a man believes, so he will act.
SAM HARRISIf 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