Quotes from Sam Harris

The men and women on death row have some combination of bad genes, bad parents, bad ideas, and bad luck—which of these quantities, exactly, were they responsible for? No human being stands as author to his own genes or his upbringing, and yet we have every reason to believe that these factors determine his character throughout life.

We must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it.

Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind.

Over 99 percent of the species that ever walked, flew, or slithered upon this earth are now extinct. This fact alone appears to rule out intelligent design.

Where is the freedom in being perfectly satisfied with your thoughts, intentions, and subsequent actions when they are the product of prior events that you had absolutely no hand in creating?

It is inevitable, therefore, that some approaches to politics, economics, science, and even spirituality and ethics will be objectively better than their competitors (by any measure of better we might wish to adopt), and gradations here will translate into very real differences in human happiness.

Robert Trivers argues, for instance, that people who can believe their own lies turn out to be the best liars of all—and an ability to deceive rivals has obvious advantages in the state of nature.

We cannot live by reason alone.

People have been cherry-picking the Bible for millennia to justify their every impulse, moral and otherwise.

Secularism is simply a commitment to keeping religion out of politics and public policy.

Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: "Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.

What we call reality is just when we all agree about our hallucinations.

God cannot be judged by human standards of morality. But we have seen that human standards of morality are precisely what you use to establish God's goodness in the first place. And any God who could concern Himself with something as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which He is addressed in prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that. There

If your denial of death is sufficiently explicit and persuasive that you believe death isn't real, then what you deny isn't death but the significance of life.

Just keep your foot on the gas until you run out of road.

But while having some choice is generally good, it seems that having too many options tends to undermine our feelings of satisfaction, no matter which option we choose.

Your principal concern appears to be that the creator of the universe will take offense at something people do while naked.

Sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual understanding—these and other sources of moral wealth are destroyed the moment we deliberately misrepresent our beliefs, whether or not our lies are ever discovered.

The opportunity to decieve others is ever present and often tempting, and each instance of deception casts us onto some of the steepest ethical terrain we ever cross.

Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is denial - at once full of hope and full of fear - of the vastitude of human ignorance.

The temptation to start each day with several glazed donuts and to end it with an extramarital affair might be difficult for some people to resist, for reasons that are easily understood in evolutionary terms, but there are surely better ways to maximize one's long-term well-being.

Over one million people died in the orgy of religious killing that attended the partitioning of India and Pakistan. The two countries have since fought three official wars, suffered a continuous bloodletting at their shared border, and are now poised to exterminate one another with nuclear weapons simply because they disagree about "facts" that are every bit as fanciful as the names of Santa's reindeer.

In the best case, faith leaves otherwise well-intentioned people incapable of thinking rationally about many of their deepest concerns; at worst, it is a continuous source of human violence.

that was the moment we understood that things can go terribly wrong in our world—not because life is unfair or moral progress impossible but because we have failed, generation after generation, to abolish the delusions and animosities of our ignorant ancestors.