Quotes from Sam Harris

New Age thinkers usually enter the ditch on the other side of the road: They idealize altered states of consciousness and draw specious connections between subjective experience and the spookier theories at the frontiers of physics.

Your principal concern appears to be that the Creator of the universe will take offense at something people do while naked. This prudery of yours contributes daily to the surplus of human misery.

Fundamentalist Christians support Israel because they believe that the final consolidation of Jewish power in the Holy Land—specifically, the rebuilding of Solomon's temple—will usher in both the Second Coming of Christ and the final destruction of the Jews.

Most people in positions of leadership in our country will say that there is no direct link between the Muslim faith and "terrorism." It is clear, however, that Muslims hate the West in the very terms of their faith and that the Koran mandates such hatred.

how one uses one's attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds—and lives—are largely shaped by how we use them.

It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self—an "I" or a "me"—vanished.

The promise of spiritual life - indeed, the very thing that makes it 'spiritual' in the sense I invoke throughout this book - is that there are truths about the mind that we are better off knowing. What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are.

Islam is a "religion of peace.

Not wanting to have an obvious hand in actually separating church and state, the U.S. Congress amended an appropriations bill to ensure that federal funds could not be used for the monument's removal.

Give people divergent, irreconcilable, and untestable notions about what happens after death, and then oblige them to live together with limited resources. The result is just what we see: an unending cycle of murder and cease-fire. If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have found a recipe for the fall of civilization.

Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed.

Among the many paradoxes of human life, this is perhaps the most peculiar and consequential: We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy.

I came away convinced that lying, even about the smallest matters, needlessly damages personal relationships and public trust.

One of the worst things about breaking the law is that it puts one at odds with an indeterminate number of other people. This is among the many corrosive effects of having unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically blameless. 

we are confronted by people who hold beliefs for which there is no rational justification

Uno de los principales problemas del mentiroso es que debe seguir el rastro de sus mentiras.

viable path to God

When will we realize that the concessions we have made to faith in our political discourse have prevented us from even speaking about, much less uprooting, the most prolific source of violence in our history?

Taking oneself to be the thinker of one's thoughts—that is, not recognizing the present thought to be a transitory appearance in consciousness—is a delusion that produces nearly every species of human conflict and unhappiness.

In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own.

Some people are content in the midst of deprivation and danger, while others are miserable despite having all the luck in the world. This is not to say that external circumstances do not matter. But it is your mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determines the quality of your life. Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others. Given this fact, it makes sense to train it. Scientists and skeptics generally

Vulnerability comes in pretending to be someone you are not.

Lieutenant General William G. Boykin

Despite how impressive many of my teachers were, they were undoubtedly human and susceptible to the same cultural biases and physical infirmities that define the lives of ordinary people.