It’s simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.
SAM HARRISMost 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.
More Sam Harris Quotes
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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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The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms.
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When someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we’re told that? God is mysterious.
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We are all prisoners of our thoughts.
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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.
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Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.
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Atheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations.
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The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.
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I’m the Ted Bundy of string theory.
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An argument can be logically valid, but unsound in that it contains a false premise and, therefore, leads to a false conclusion (e.g., Scientists are smart; smart people do not make mistakes; therefore, scientists do not make mistakes).
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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.
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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.
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The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It’s really no more inflammatory than that.
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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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One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.
SAM HARRIS






