Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
Sam Harris
117 quotes
“It is time we admitted that we are not at war with "terrorism". We are at war with Islam. This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims, but we are absolutely at war with the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran. The only reason Muslim fundamentalism is a threat to us is because the fundamentals of Islam are a threat to us.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, "Mired in a religious war", Washington Times (1 December 2004)
“Unreason is now ascendant in the United States—in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum. There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, "The Politics of Ignorance" (2 August 2005)
“We are now in the 21st century: all books, including the Koran, should be fair game for flushing down the toilet without fear of violent reprisal.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The treatment of women in Muslim communities throughout the world is unconscionable.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, "Bombing Our Illusions" (10 October 2005)
“The principal tenet of Jainism is non-harming. Observant Jains will literally not harm a fly. Fundamentalist Jainism and fundamentalist Islam do not have the same consequences, neither logically nor behaviorally.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Q&A with Sam Harris (2005)
“Our circumstance is abject, indefensible, and terrifying. It would be hilarious if the stakes were not so high.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've read the books. God is not a moderate. There's no place in the books where God says, "You know, when you get to the New World and you develop your three branches of government and you have a civil society, you can just jettison all the barbarism I recommended in the first books.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, “Religion, Terror, and Self-Transcendence.” The Ethical Culture Society and the Center for Inquiry, New York, NY, November 16, 2005 (broadcast on CSPAN-2)
“If Jesus does come down out of the clouds like a superhero, Christianity will stand revealed as a science. That will be the science of Christianity.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, “Religion, Terror, and Self-Transcendence.” The Ethical Culture Society and the Center for Inquiry, New York, NY, November 16, 2005 (broadcast on CSPAN-2)
“The problem with faith, is that it really is a conversation stopper. Faith is a declaration of immunity to the powers of conversation. It is a reason, why you do not have to give reasons, for what you believe.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, "The View From The End Of The World" (9 December 2005)
“Religious faith is the only area of discourse where immunity through conversation is considered noble. It's the only area of our lives where someone can win points for saying, "There's nothing that you can do to change my mind and I'm taking no state of the world ultimately into account in believing what I believe. There's nothing to change about the world that would cause me to revise my beliefs.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, "The View From The End Of The World" (9 December 2005)
“The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Given current birthrates, France could be a majority Muslim country in 25 years, and that is if immigration were to stop tomorrow”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, On the Reality of Islam, 2006-02-07
“The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific notions of martyrdom and jihad that fully explain the character of Muslim violence.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced. In a world that has long been terrorized by fratricidal Sky-God religions, the ascendance of Buddhism would surely be a welcome development.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are ideas within Buddhism that are so incredible as to render the dogma of the virgin birth plausible by comparison.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, "Killing the Buddha" (March 2006)
“As a source of objective morality, the Bible is one of the worst books we have. It might be the very worst, in fact—if we didn't also happen to have the Qur'an.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, "The Myth of Secular Moral Chaos" (29 March 2006) — in Free Inquiry, Vol. 26, issue 3
“The dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, "The End of Liberalism?", Los Angeles Times, 18 September 2006.
“If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion. I think more people are dying as a result of our religious myths than as a result of any other ideology. I would not say that all human conflict is born of religion or religious differences, but for the human community to be fractured on the basis of religious doctrines that are fundamentally incompatible, in an age when nuclear weapons are proliferating, is a terrifying scenario.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No culture in human history ever suffered because its people became too reasonable or too desirous of having evidence in defense of their core beliefs.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is rather more noble to help people purely out of concern for their suffering than it is to help them because you think the Creator of the Universe wants you to do it, or will reward you for doing it, or will punish you for not doing it. The problem with this linkage between religion and morality is that it gives people bad reasons to help other human beings when good reasons are available.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, Beyond Belief 2006 conference
“If religion were the only durable foundation for morality you would suspect atheists to be really badly behaved. You would go to a group like the National Academy of Sciences. These are the most elite scientists, 93 percent of whom reject the idea of God. You would expect these guys to be raping and killing and stealing with abandon.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, During speech, The New Atheists (January 5, 2007)
“We have Christians against Muslims against Jews. They're making incompatible claims on real estate in the Middle East as though God were some kind of omniscient real estate broker parsing out parcels of land to his chosen flock. People are literally dying over ancient literature.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris. Harris, Sam, and Reza Aslan. 2007. “Religion Reason Debate, Jan 25 2007 | Video | C-SPAN.Org.” January 25. https://www.c-span.org/video/?196385-1/religion-reason-debate.
“Mormonism, it seems to me, is—objectively—just a little more idiotic than Christianity is. It has to be: because it is Christianity plus some very stupid ideas.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Death is, in some ways, unacceptable. It’s just an astonishing fact of our being here that we die. But I think worse than that is if we live long enough, we lose everyone we love in this world. I mean people die and disappear, and we’re left with this stark mystery: just the sheer not knowing of what happened to them.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, Big Think Sam Harris On Death (4 July 2007)
“The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (updated 25 May 2011)
“many Muslims ... We’re just going to keep having big families, and eventually it’s going to be Eurabia, and the war will be won. There are people who really think in those terms, and they’re not necessarily just the people in the center of the bull’s-eye of Islamic infatuation.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, Facts, Values and a Place for the Profound , The Science Network, 2008-10-03
“If premarital sex is a sin, who is the victim?”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Attribution to Sam Harris in A. Alexander, Fly Fishing for Sharks (2008), p. 91.
“Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Muslim discourse is currently a tissue of myths, conspiracy theories, and exhortations to recapture the glories of the seventh century.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Jesus Christ—who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens—can now be eaten in the form of a cracker.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is therefore not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves- socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. You are, of course, free to interpret the Bible differently—though isn't it amazing that you have succeeded in discerning the true teachings of Christianity, while the most influential thinkers in the history of your faith failed?”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: "Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being." Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps you think that the crucial difference between a fly and a human blastocyst is to be found in the latter's potential to become a fully developed human being. But almost every cell in your body is a potential human being, given our recent advances in genetic engineering. Every time you scratch your nose, you have committed a Holocaust of potential human beings. This is a fact. The argument from a cell's potential gets you absolutely nowhere.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“20 percent of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage. There is an obvious truth here that cries out for acknowledgment: if God exists, He is the most prolific abortionist of all.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Atheism is not a philosophy - it is not even a view of the world. It is simply an admission of the obvious. 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." We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or He does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the enduring pathologies of human culture is the tendency to raise children to fear and demonize other human beings on the basis of religious faith.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You are happily being misunderstood in your use of the word "God".”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris in debate against Deepak Chopra on ABC Nightline (23 March 2010) "Does God Have a Future?
“The “war on drugs” has been well lost, and should never have been waged. While it isn’t explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution, I can think of no political right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one’s own consciousness. The fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them, at enormous expense, constitutes one of the great moral failures of our time.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, Drugs and the Meaning of Life (5 July 2011) [audio version]
“Needless to say, if I knew my daughter would eventually develop a fondness for methamphetamine or crack cocaine, I might never sleep again. But if she does not try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in her adult life, I will worry that she may have missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, Drugs and the Meaning of Life (5 July 2011)
“As a general matter, I believe we should be very slow to make conclusions about the nature of the cosmos based upon inner experience – no matter how profound these experiences seem.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, Drugs and the Meaning of Life (5 July 2011)
“The power of psychedelics... is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, Drugs and the Meaning of Life (5 July 2011)
“Principle #1: Avoid dangerous people and dangerous places. Principle #2: Do not defend your property. Principle #3: Respond immediately and escape.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, The Truth about Violence, "3 Principles of Self-Defense", November 5, 2011.
“Atheism is just a way of clearing the space for better conversations.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, "Death and the Present Moment", speech at the Global Atheist Convention (April 2012)
“Even when we think we are in the present moment we are in very subtle ways looking over its shoulder anticipating what's coming next. We're always solving a problem. And it's possible to simply drop your problem, if only for a moment, and enjoy whatever is true of your life in the present... This is not a matter of new information or more information. It requires a change in attitude. It requires a change in the attentiveness you pay to your experience in the present moment.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, "Death and the Present Moment", speech at the Global Atheist Convention (April 2012)