Quotes from Sam Harris

there seems to be no doubt that love and compassion are good, in that they connect us more deeply to others.30 Given this situation, we can see that one could desire to become more loving and compassionate for purely selfish reasons.

It seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it was written in the stars but because it was written in our books; it is what we do with words like 'God' and 'paradise' and ''sin' in the present that will determine our future.

The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain's motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move.

The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology.

One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do.

Christopher Hitchens for distilling, in a single phrase, a principle of discourse that could well arrest our slide toward the abyss: "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."15 Let us pray that billions of us soon agree with him.

Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.

the United States government will not tolerate any disrespect for the holy Koran." What form our government's intolerance will take remains unspecified. I await a knock on the door.

The practice of recognizing nondual awareness is called trekchod, which means "cutting through" in Tibetan, as in cutting a string cleanly so that both ends fall away. Once one has cut it, there is no doubt that it has been cut. I recommend that you demand the same clarity of your meditation practice.

the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism:

Am I free to change my mind? Of course not. It can only change me.

However, to say that I could have done otherwise is merely to think the thought "I could have done otherwise" after doing whatever I in fact did. This is an empty affirmation.

I cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know—it just happens. Where is the freedom in that?

the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.

invidious comparisons of this kind is to stand convicted of bigotry.

There is indeed something preposterous about well-educated Westerners racing East in search of spiritual enlightenment while Easterners make the opposite pilgrimage seeking education and economic opportunities.

And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not "deserve" our success in any deep sense.

It would seem that very few good things in life come from our accepting the present moment as it is. To become educated, we must be motivated to learn. To master a sport requires that we continually improve our performance and overcome our resistance to physical exertion. To

Nothing that a Christian and a Muslim can say to each other will render their beliefs mutually vulnerable to discourse, because the very tenets of their faith have immunized them against the power of conversation.

At least one study suggests that 10 percent of communication between spouses is deceptive.[4] Another has found that 38 percent of encounters among college students contain lies.

It is therefore in the very nature of faith to serve as an impediment to further inquiry.

Drug abuse and addiction are very real problems, the remedy for which is education and medical treatment, not incarceration. In fact, the most abused drugs in the United States now appear to be oxycodone and other prescription painkillers. Should

Peaceful, honest people have the right to be left alone.

To say that someone freely chose to squander his life's savings at the poker table is to say that he had every opportunity to do otherwise and that nothing about what he did was inadvertent.