Quotes from Sam Harris

The Israelis have shown a degree of restraint in their use of violence that the Nazis never contemplated and that, more to the point, no Muslim society would contemplate today. Ask yourself, what are the chances that the Palestinians would show the same restraint in killing Jews if the Jews were a powerless minority living under their occupation and disposed to acts of suicidal terrorism? It would be no more likely than Muhammad's flying to heaven on a winged horse.35

Our habitual failure to recognise thought as thought, our habitual identification with discursive thought, is the primary source of human suffering.

Our pleasures, however refined or easily acquired, are by their very nature fleeting. They begin to subside the instant the arise, only to be replaced by fresh desires or feelings of discomfort.

According to a recent poll, 36 percent of British Muslims (ages sixteen to twenty-four) think apostates should be put to death for their unbelief.60 Are these people "morally motivated," in Haidt's sense, or just morally confused? And

Different techniques produce long-lasting changes in attention, emotion, cognition, and pain perception, and these correlate with both structural and functional changes in the brain.

There is at least a billion people in this world, who would consider their prayers answered if they could switch places with you.

The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia ago - and who seems to have abandoned them to bloodshed in his name ever since - is no one to consult on questions of ethics. Indeed, to judge him on the basis of his works is highly invidious undertaking.

We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy.

There's certainly no unchanging self that is carried through from one moment to the next. Its a processes; it's not a thing. You're a verb more than you're a noun (from the point of view of neuroscience).

the 2.5 billion seconds that make up the average human

Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved. If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won't matter how successful you become or who is in your life—you won't enjoy any of it.

The problem with religion is that it blends this truth so thoroughly with the venom of unreason.

The fascist says, It's not what you think, or what you think you know, that is important. The only truth is whether or not you feel subjectively, spiritually, part of a larger national community __ and if you do, wonderful! And if you don't, then you're an enemy.

Part of our challenge is to galvanize and organize this silent majority against jihadism so that it can start challenging the narrative of violence that has been popularized by the organized minority currently dominating the discourse.

to lie is to infringe upon the freedom of those we care about.

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil (this is traditionally called the problem of theodicy) is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics. Surely there must come a time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is not little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.

Most people who believe they are meditating are merely thinking with their eyes closed. By practicing mindfulness, however, one can awaken from the dream of discursive thought and begin to see each arising image, idea, or bit of language vanish without a trace. What remains is consciousness itself, with its attendant sights, sounds, sensations, and thoughts appearing and changing in every moment.

Life is not a noun, it's a verb.

When was the last time that someone was criticized for not respecting another person's unfounded beliefs about physics or history? The same rules should apply to ethical, spiritual, and religious beliefs as well.

It has long been known that stress, especially early in life, alters brain structure. For instance, studies both in animals and in humans have shown that early stress increases the size of the amygdalae. One study found that an eight-week program of mindfulness meditation reduced the volume of the right basolateral amygdala, and these changes were correlated with a subjective decrease in stress.

mere five minutes of practice a day (for five weeks) increased left-sided baseline activity in the frontal cortex—a pattern that, as we saw in the discussion of the split brain, has been associated with positive emotions.

To see how fully our moral intuitions must shift, consider what would happen if we discovered a cure for human evil. Imagine that every relevant change in the human brain could now be made cheaply, painlessly, and safely. In fact, the cure could be put directly into the food supply, like vitamin D. Evil would become nothing more than a nutritional deficiency.

It is one thing to bicker with your wife because you are in a bad mood; it is another to realize that your mood and behavior have been caused by low blood sugar.

If you're suffering, you're thinking.