Sam Harris Quotes

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Sam Harris

Profession : Author

Birth : April 9, 1967

The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It's really no more inflammatory than that.

Sam Harris

My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own. That's not to say that all religious people are lunatics or idiots. It's anything but that.

Sam Harris

The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good.

Sam Harris

The usefulness of religion - the fact that it gives life meaning, that it makes people feel good - is not an argument for the truth of any religious doctrine. It's not an argument that it's reasonable to believe that Jesus really was born of a virgin or that the Bible is the perfect word of the creator of the universe.

Sam Harris

It's not so much religion per se, it's false certainty that worries me, and religion just has more than its fair share of false certainty or dogmatism. I'm really concerned when I see people pretending to know things they clearly cannot know.

Sam Harris

Religion provides the only story that is fundamentally consoling in the face of the worst possible experiences - the death of a parent, for instance. In fact, many religions take away the problem entirely, because their adherents ostensibly believe that they're going to be reunited with everyone they love, and death is an illusion.

Sam Harris

Religion has convinced us that there's something else entirely other than concerns about suffering. There's concerns about what God wants, there's concerns about what's going to happen in the afterlife.

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

Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.

Sam Harris

It's simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.

Sam Harris

We're right to say that a culture that can't tolerate free speech is... there are a wide range of positive human experiences that are not available in that culture. And we're right to want those experiences.

Sam Harris

Positive social emotions like compassion and empathy are generally good for us, and we want to encourage them. But do we know how to most reliably raise children to care about the suffering of other people? I'm not sure we do.

Sam Harris

Religious ideas about good and evil tend to focus on how to achieve well-being in the next life, and this makes them terrible guides to securing it in this one. Of course, there are a few gems to be found in every religious tradition, but insofar as these precepts are wise and useful they are not, in principle, religious.

Sam Harris

Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma.

Sam Harris

I think there are universal principles that we should want to understand, but that are not necessarily good for us. We could recognise universal propensities which current cultures can't fully eradicate, which we would want to eradicate if we could. Let's say, a tendency for tribal violence. Or racism.

Sam Harris

One of the great responsibilities we have as a society is to educate ourselves, along with the next generation, about which substances are worth ingesting, and for what purpose, and which are not.

Sam Harris

Nearly half of the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. This dewy-eyed nihilism provides absolutely no incentive to build a sustainable civilization. Many of these people are lunatics, but they are not the lunatic fringe.

Sam Harris

The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms.

Sam Harris

Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects.

Sam Harris

The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.

Sam Harris