Quotes from Sam Harris

To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world—to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish—is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.

Our interests in life are not always served by viewing people and things as collections of atoms—but this doesn't negate the truth or utility of physics.

The neighbors find the event a great cause for celebration and honor the young man's parents by giving them gifts of food and money.

looking for a path back to the present:

No human being us responsible for his genes or his upbringing, yet we have every reason to believe that these factors determine his character.

ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion.

By wearing cosmetics a woman seeks to look younger or more beautiful than she otherwise would. Honesty doesn't require that she issue a continuous disclaimer: I see you are looking at my face. Please be aware that I don't look this good first thing in the morning.

There is no question that many religious disciplines can produce interesting experiences in suitable minds. It should be clear, however, that engaging a faith-based (and probably delusional) practice, whatever its effects, isn't the same as investigating the nature of one's mind absent any doctrinal assumptions.

With each passing year, do our religious beliefs conserve more and more of the data of human experience? If religion addresses a genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity, then it should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should become more useful, rather than less. Progress in religion, as in other fields, would have to be a matter of present inquiry, not the mere reiteration of past doctrine. Whatever

Clearly, the chief enemy of open conversation is dogmatism in all its forms. Dogmatism is a well-recognized obstacle to scientific reasoning, and yet, because scientists have been reluctant even to imagine that they might have something prescriptive to say about values, dogmatism is still granted remarkable scope on questions of both truth and goodness under the banner of religion

In the broadest sense, however, meditation is simply the ability to stop suffering in many of the usual ways, if only for a few moments at a time. How could that not be a skill worth cultivating?

If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of having dispensed with the dogma of faith. If our tribalism is ever to give way to an extended moral identity, our religious beliefs can no longer be sheltered from the tides of genuine inquiry and genuine criticism. It is time we realized that to presume knowledge where one has only pious hope is a species of evil.

No human being is responsible for his genes or his upbringing, yet we have every reason to believe that these factors determine his character.

Faith-based religion must suffer the same slide into obsolescence

Spirituality must be distinguished from religion—because people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences. While these states of mind are usually interpreted through the lens of one or another religious doctrine, we know that this is a mistake.

During the normal course of events, your mind will determine the quality of your life.

to the experience of being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you are sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall.

Identity must start with humanity as a founding principle, and human rights as a basis.

How can we make sense of our lives, and hold people accountable for their choices, given the unconscious origins of our conscious minds?

Either consciousness is epiphenomenal or it's outside a physical system but somehow playing a role in physics. That's a more traditional, dualist possibility. Or there's a third possibility: Consciousness is somehow built in at the fundamental level of physics.

I do not remember what I thought about lying before I took "The Ethical Analyst," but the course accomplished as close to a firmware upgrade of my brain as I have ever experienced. I came away convinced that lying, even about the smallest matters, needlessly damages personal relationships and public trust.

If the laws of nature do not strike most of us as incompatible with free will, that is because we have not imagined how human behavior would appear if all cause-and-effect relationships were understood.

These people say things like "If a liberal intellectual like you can't speak about the link between specific doctrines and violence without being defamed as a bigot, what hope is there for someone like me, who has to worry about being killed by her own family or village for merely expressing doubts about God?" So yes, I'm aware that one can't speak in Pakistan as I do here.

It seems that such notions were the product of folklore, vivid dreams, and sheer confabulation—and confirmed by confessions elicited under the most gruesome torture