Quotes from Sam Harris

I think it would be extremely helpful if people focused on the ideas being discussed here, rather than on calling you names—which is an easy way to ignore your ideas.

Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy.

One must be able to pay attention closely enough to glimpse what consciousness is like between thoughts—that is, prior to the arising of the next one. Consciousness does not feel like a self. Once one realizes this, the status of thoughts themselves, as transient expressions of consciousness, can be understood.

Ethical transgressions are generally divided into two categories: the bad things we do (acts of commission) and the good things we fail to do (acts of omission). We tend to judge the former far more harshly. The origin of this imbalance remains a mystery, but it surely relates to the value we place on a person's energy and intent.

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.

Many truths about ourselves will be discovered in consciousness directly or not discovered at all.

As human being, we live in a perpetual conversation between conversation and violence; what apart from fundamental willingness to be reasonable, can guarantee that we will keep talking to one another?

But the reality of consciousness appears irreducible. Only consciousness can know itself—and directly, through first-person experience.

La mayor parte de las formas de degradación personal y maldad pública se desencadenan y sustentan con la mentira. Los actos de adulterio y demás deslealtades personales, el fraude económico, la corrupción gubernamental... hasta el asesinato y el genocidio suelen requerir un defecto moral adicional: la disposición para mentir.

If you're constantly ruminating about what you just did- or what you should have done- or what you would have done if you only had the chance, you will miss your life. Ok, you will fail to connect with it. You will fail to connect with other people.

Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance—and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism.

Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature—to say nothing of killing and dying for them—would be impossible to justify. What stops us from finding it impossible now?

The burn of lifting weights, for instance, would be excruciating if it were a symptom of terminal illness. But because it is associated with health and fitness, most people find it enjoyable. Here we see that cognition and emotion are not separate. The way we think about experience can completely determine how we feel about it.

While we may never achieve closure in our view of the world, it seems extraordinarily likely that our descendants will look upon many of our beliefs as both impossibly quaint and suicidally stupid.

If one didn't know better, one would think that man, in his fear of losing all that he loves, had created heaven, along with its gatekeeper God, in his own image.

A true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time.

Pero cuando se nos pide una opinión, no hacemos ningún favor a nuestros amigos fingiendo no apreciar defectos en su trabajo, en especial cuando quienes no son sus amigos están obligados a reparar en esos mismos defectos.

A puppet is free so long as he loves his strings

Honesty is a gift we can give to others. It is also a source of power and an engine of simplicity. Knowing that we will attempt to tell the truth, whatever the circumstances, leaves us with little to prepare for. We can simply be ourselves.

Aceptar mantener un secreto es asumir una carga.

People who hold strong convictions without evidence, belong at the margins of our society, not in our halls of power.

Arranging atoms in certain ways appears to bring about an experience of being that very collection of atoms. This is undoubtedly one of the deepest mysteries given to us to contemplate.

Here we come upon a terrible facet of ethically asymmetric warfare: when your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another weapon in his hand.

IT is no accident that people of faith often want to curtail the private freedoms of others.