Quotes from Sam Harris

The Koran points to another contemptible characteristic of the Jews: their craven desire to live, no matter at what price and regardless of quality, honor, and dignity.

when we merely want to know how people behaved in the past, we dub our interests "historical" or "journalistic"; and when a person's commitment to evidence and logic grows dangerously thin or simply snaps under the burden of fear, wishful thinking, tribalism, or ecstasy, we recognize that he is being "religious.

it is actually a powerful distillation of the Muslim worldview.

religious traditions are no more reliable on questions of ethics than they have been on scientific questions generally.

In fact, atheism is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist.

It is time we realized that we need not be unreasonable to suffuse our lives with love, compassion, ecstasy, and awe; nor must we renounce all forms of spirituality or mysticism to be on good terms with reason

What we condemn most in another person is the conscious intention to do harm.

There is undoubtedly an important secular debate to be had about the ethics of the death penalty, but it is just as obvious that we should be drawing upon sources that show a greater understanding of the human mind and modern society than is evident in Saint Paul.

And we must decline to tell our children that human history began with bloody magic and will end with bloody magic in a glorious war between the righteous and the rest.

The concessions we have made to religious faith - to the idea that belief can be sanctified by something other than evidence - have rendered us unable to name, much less address, one of the most pervasive causes of conflict in our world.

From the perspective of faith, it is better to ape the behaviour of one's ancestors than to find creative ways to uncover new truths in the present.

They are extreme in their devotion to the literal word of the Koran and the hadith

Nevertheless, many people are now convinced that the attacks of September 11 say little about Islam and much about the sordid career of the West—in particular, about the failures of U.S. foreign policy.

It is worth remembering that if God created the world and all things in it, he created smallpox, plague, and filariasis.

Atheism is nothing more than bosses reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.

Some people think that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets are justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies.

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. Knowing that we told the truth in the past leaves us with nothing to keep track of. We can simply be ourselves in every moment. In

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.

Christianity, in particular, presents impressive obstacles to thinking intelligently about the nature of the human mind, asserting, as it does, the real existence of individual souls who are subject to the eternal judgment of God.

most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.

sacred explosions"?

But what about love, compassion, moral goodness, and self-transcendence? Many people still imagine that religion is the true repository of these virtues. To change this, we must talk about the full range of human experience in a way that is as free of dogma as the best science already is.

He goes so far as to suggest that we were secretly hoping that such devastation would be visited upon us:

Bertrand Russell