Quotes from Sam Harris

A total prohibition against lying is also ethically incoherent in anyone but a true pacifist.

Without death, the influence of faith-based religion is unthinkable. Clearly, the fact of death is intolerable to us, and faith is little more than the shadow cast by our hope for a better life beyond the grave.

Our common humanity is reason enough to protect our fellow human beings from coming to harm.

Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others.

It should also trouble NDE enthusiasts that only 10 to 20 percent of people who approach clinical death recall having any experience at all.13

I am arguing that science can, in principle, help us understand what we would do and should want - and, therefore, what other people should do and should want in order to live the best lives possible. My claim is that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, just as there are right and wrong answers to questions of physics, and such answers may on day fall within reach of the maturing sciences of mind.

Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.

The gurus I have met personally, as well as those whose careers and teachings I have studied at a distance, range from crooks who could be quickly dismissed to teachers who were brilliant but flawed, to those who, while still human, seemed to possess so much compassion and clarity of mind that they were nearly flawless examples of the benefits of spiritual practice.

Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.

Lewis observes that "for Muslims, no piece of land once added to the realm of Islam can ever be finally renounced.

toda mentira nos persigue en el futuro.

Within the House of Islam, the penalty for learning too much about the world—so as to call the tenets of the faith into question—is death.

Las mentiras de los poderosos nos hacen desconfiar de gobiernos y grandes empresas.

While they rightly question every aspect of their "own" Western culture in the name of progress, they censure liberal Muslims who attempt to do so within Islam, and they choose to side instead with every regressive reactionary in the name of "cultural authenticity" and anticolonialism.

Las mentiras de los débiles nos vuelven insensibles al sufrimiento de los demás.

One must climb the mountain so that freedom can be found at the top. But the self is already an illusion, and that truth can be glimpsed directly, at the mountain's base or anywhere else along the path.

if each party values his opponent's concessions as gains and his own as losses, each is bound to perceive his sacrifice as being greater.34

Anti-Semitism is intrinsic to both Christianity and Islam; both traditions consider the Jews to be bunglers of God's initial revelation.

Interestingly, when one functions in this mode, one quickly recognizes all the other people who are playing the same game. I had many encounters wherein I would meet the eyes of a person across the room, and suddenly we were playing War of the Warlocks: two strangers holding each other's gaze well past the point that our primate genes or cultural conditioning would ordinarily countenance. Play this game long enough and you begin to have some very strange encounters.

He prolongs their life and prosperity so that they may continue heaping sin upon sin and all the more richly deserve the torments that await them beyond the grave.

Las mentiras de los teóricos de la conspiración suscitan dudas sobre la honradez de quienes denuncian injusticias, aun cuando estén diciendo la verdad.

The truth is that some people appear to be almost entirely motivated by their religious beliefs. Absent those beliefs, their behavior would make absolutely no sense; with them, it becomes perfectly understandable, even rational.

But one need not believe in psychic powers to cut through the illusion of the self. Accomplishing this can be elusive enough. If I've met a person who has done so perfectly, I am unaware of it.

If pain were all that mattered, it would be as important to protect the rabbits from the foxes as to protect the Jews from the Nazis."16