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Sam Harris
117 quotes
“If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, "Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural? – William Lane Craig vs. Sam Harris, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, United States – April 2011
“From my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris at Sydney Opera House Festival of Dangerous Ideas 2012, Discussion on Free Will.
“We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it. And, again, I wouldn’t put someone who looks like me entirely outside the bull’s-eye (after all, what would Adam Gadahn look like if he cleaned himself up?) But there are people who do not stand a chance of being jihadists, and TSA screeners can know this at a glance.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, In Defense of Profiling (April 28, 2012)
“I describe it as anti-profiling. It's not that I want certain people profiled – I just want us to admit that certain people require less scrutiny, and Jerry Seinfeld is one. When you see a famous celebrity go through security, treated as though he may just have become a jihadist when no one was watching… It's crazy. It is security theatre.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing that I've said makes social and political freedom any less valuable: having a gun to your head is still a problem worth rectifying, wherever intentions come from. So the freedom to do what one wants is still precious. But the idea that we as conscious beings are deeply responsible for what we want I think needs to be revised: it just can't be mapped onto reality, neither objective nor subjective. And if we're going to be guided by reality, rather than by the fantasy lives of our antecessors, I think our view of ourselves needs to change.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris at Sydney Opera House Festival of Dangerous Ideas 2012, Discussion on Free Will.
“I think it [getting a gun] should be like getting a pilot's license. I think you should require training to get a license to have a gun.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, Real Time with Bill Maher (February 1, 2013)
“Your life doesn't get any better than your mind is: You might have wonderful friends, perfect health, a great career, and everything else you want, and you can still be miserable. The converse is also true: There are people who basically have nothing—who live in circumstances that you and I would do more or less anything to avoid—who are happier than we tend to be because of the character of their minds. Unfortunately, one glimpse of this truth is never enough. We have to be continually reminded of it.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, Taming the Mind (April 12, 2014)
“Meditation … puts into question more or less everything you tend to do in your search for happiness. But if you lose sight of this, it can become just another strategy for seeking happiness—a more refined version of the problem you already have.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, Taming the Mind (April 12, 2014)
“Many people who experience illness imagine that everyone else is blissfully getting on with life in perfect health—and this illusion compounds their suffering.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, Adventures in the Land of Illness (May 26, 2014)
“Perhaps the most important thing one can discover through the practice of meditation is that the "self"—the conventional sense of being a subject, a thinker, an experiencer living inside one's head—is an illusion.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, Interview with The Minimalists (19 August 2014)
“The self really is an illusion—and realizing this is the basis of spiritual life.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, Interview with The Minimalists (19 August 2014)
“Your mind is all you truly have.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, Interview with The Minimalists (19 August 2014)
“A hatred of infidels is arguably the central message of the Koran.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, "Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon" (10 September 2014)
“But what do you think would happen if we had burned a copy of the Koran on tonight's show? There would be riots in scores of countries. Embassies would fall. In response to our mistreating a book, millions of Muslims would take to the streets, and we would spend the rest of our lives fending off credible threats of murder. But when ISIS crucifies people, buries children alive, and rapes and tortures women by the thousands—all in the name of Islam—the response is a few small demonstrations in Europe and a hashtag.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, "Can Liberalism Be Saved From Itself?" (October 7, 2014)
“I think the apostates, the intellectuals, the women, the gays of the Muslim world are the most important people in the world right now. If we could give greencards to every real secularist in the Muslim world, I think they should just get to the front of the line. These are the people who need to be empowered. The irony is that if they could leave the Muslim world… The Muslim world needs them, so the best thing would be to empower them in the Muslim world. […] Everything I say about Islam is a confession of solidarity with these people.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, on The Rubin Report "Sam Harris: Islam vs All Muslims" (10 September 2015)
“[On being "genial, soft-spoken and unflappable" despite having "hard arguments"]: As far as my being friendly to most of my opponents, it comes from the fact that none of this is personal. I don't take any of this personal. I don't take any criticism of my ideas personal, and as far as I'm concerned, everything I believe is on the table and fit to be challenged. There's nothing I'm holding back, there's nothing that I'm holding sacred, such that if you were to doubt it, I would take your doubt personal, or I would see it as something that would diminish me personally.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, "PRIVATE: THE DAVID GREGORY SHOW #5" (13 may 2016)
“On one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Tim Ferris, "Tools of Titans" (2016), p. 454
“The penalty for apostasy is death. We would do well to linger over this fact for a moment, because it is the black pearl of intolerance that no liberal exegesis will ever fully digest.....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) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mistaking no answers in practice for no answers in principle is a great source of moral confusion.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fact that millions of people use the term "morality" as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science has long been in the value business. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; rather, scientific validity is the result of scientists making their best efforts to value principles of reasoning that link their beliefs to reality, through reliable chains of evidence and argument. This is how norms of rational thought are made effective... The answer to the question "What should I believe, and why should I believe it?" is generally a scientific one.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. Many of us spend our lives marching with open eyes toward remorse, regret, guilt, and disappointment. And nowhere do our injuries seem more casually self-inflicted, or the suffering we create more disproportionate to the needs of the moment, than in the lies we tell to other human beings. Lying is the royal road to chaos.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. We can simply be ourselves.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every lie haunts our future.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whatever its imagined virtues, faith is the enemy of open and honest inquiry. Remaining open to the powers of conversation - to new evidence and better arguments - is not only essential for rationality. It is essential for love.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next - a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please - your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this "decision" and believe that you are in the process of making it.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our sense of free will results from a failure to appreciate this: We do not know what we intend to do until the intention itself arises. To understand this is to realize that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say that I would have lived in a different universe had I been in a different universe.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But from a deeper perspective (speaking both objectively and subjectively), thoughts simply arise unauthored and yet author our actions.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You are not in control of your mind—because you, as a conscious agent, are only part of your mind, living at the mercy of other parts.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You are either lucky in this department or you aren't—and you cannot make your own luck.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do not choose to choose what I choose.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Speaking from personal experience, I think that losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics - by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The urge for retribution depends upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is not a person on earth who chose his genome, or the country of his birth, or the political and economic conditions that prevailed at moments crucial to his progress. And yet, living in America, one gets the distinct sense that if certain conservatives were asked why they weren't born with club feet or orphaned before the age of five, they would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery: On the one hand, we can't make sense of it in scientific terms; on the other, we feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they do confirm some well-established truths about the human mind: our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The conventional sense of self is an illusion—and [] spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment. There are logical and scientific reasons to accept this claim, but recognizing it to be true is not a matter of understanding these reasons. Like many illusions, the sense of self disappears when closely examined, and this is done through the practice of meditation.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The feeling that we call "I" seems to define our point of view in every moment, and it also provides an anchor for popular beliefs about souls and freedom of will. And yet this feeling, however imperturbable it may appear at present, can be altered, interrupted, or entirely abolished.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I never made more effort than I did when practicing under U Pandita. But most of this effort arose from the very illusion of bondage to the self that I was seeking to overcome. The model of this practice is that 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. One can then return to this insight, again and again, as one's sole method of meditation—thereby arriving at the goal in each moment of actual practice.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Happiness and suffering, however extreme, are mental events. The mind depends upon the body, and the body upon the world, but everything good or bad that happens in your life must appear in consciousness to matter. This fact offers ample opportunity to make the best of bad situations—changing your perception of the world is often as good as changing the world—but it also allows a person to be miserable even when all the material and social conditions for happiness have been met. During the normal course of events, your mind will determine the quality of your life.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[About the reactions to the attack on Israel in October 2023:] The moral, not just untenability, the abomination we're witnessing where you have the same people who are equally exercised over Halloween costumes that are cultural appropriation and their defending what happened in Israel last week. That dissonance, I think, is something we need to not lose sight of culture-wide.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris X Eric Weinstein: Israel-Palestine" (at 1h50m9s), Triggernometry, 20 October 2023.
“Let’s just grant the possibility that there is a Creator God, who’s omniscient, who occasionally authors books. And he’s gonna give us a book – the most useful book. He’s a loving God, he’s a compassionate God, and he’s gonna give us a guide to life. He’s got a scribe, the scribe’s gonna write it down. What’s gonna be in that book? I mean just think of how good a book would be if it were authored by an omniscient deity. I mean, there is not a single line in the Bible or the Koran that could not have been authored by a first century person. There is not one reference to anything – there are pages and pages about how to sacrifice animals, and keep slaves, and who to kill and why. There’s nothing about electricity, there’s nothing about DNA, there’s nothing about infectious disease, the principles of infectious disease. There’s nothing particularly useful, and there’s a lot of iron age barbarism in there, and superstition. This is not a candidate book.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris in interview by Big Think (04/07/2007)
“This is a common criticism: the idea that the atheist is guilty of a literalist reading of scripture, and that it’s a very naive way of approaching religion, and there’s a far more sophisticated and nuanced view of religion on offer and the atheist is disregarding that. A few problems with this: anyone making that argument is failing to acknowledge just how many people really do approach these texts literally or functionally - whether they’re selective literalists, or literal all the way down the line. There are certain passages in scripture that just cannot be read figuratively. And people really do live by the lights of what is literally laid out in these books. So, the Koran says “hate the infidel” and Muslims hate the infidel because the Koran spells it out ad nauseam. Now, it’s true that you can cherry-pick scripture, and you can look for all the good parts. You can ignore where it says in Leviticus that if a woman is not a virgin on her wedding night you’re supposed to stone her to death on her father’s doorstep. Most religious people ignore those passages, which really can only be read literally, and say that “they were only appropriate for the time” and “they don’t apply now”. And likewise, Muslims try to have the same reading of passages that advocate holy war. They say “well, these were appropriate to those battles that Mohammed was fighting, but now we don’t have to fight those battles”. This is all a good thing, but we should recognize what’s happening here: people are feeling pressure from a host of all-too-human concerns that have nothing, in principle, to do with God: secularism, and human rights, and democracy, and scientific progress. These have made certain passages in scripture untenable. This is coming from outside religion, and religion is now making a great show of its sophistication in grappling with these pressures. This is an example of religion losing the argument with modernity.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris in interview by Big Think (04/07/2007)
“We just don’t teach people how to grieve. You know, religion is the epitome, the antithesis of teaching your children how to grieve. You tell your child that, “Grandma is in heaven”, and there’s nothing to be sad about. That’s religion. It would be better to equip your child for the reality of this life, which is, you know, we... death is a fact. And we don’t know what happens after death. And I’m not pretending to know that you get a dial tone after death. I don’t know what happens after the physical brain dies. I don’t know what the relationship between consciousness and the physical world is. I don’t think anyone does know. Now I think there are many reasons to be doubtful of naïve conceptions about the soul, and about this idea that you could just migrate to a better place after death. But I simply don’t know about what... I don’t know what I believe about death. And I don’t think it’s necessary to know in order to live as sanely and ethically and happily as possible. I don’t think you get... You don't get anything worth getting by pretending to know things you don't know.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, Big Think Sam Harris On Death (July 4, 2007)
“The truth is that religion, as we speak of it – Islam, Christianity, Judaism – is based on the claim that God dictates certain books. He doesn’t code software, he doesn’t produce films, he doesn’t score symphonies, he is an author. And this claim has achieved credibility because these books are deemed so profound they could not have possibly been written by human authors. Please consider for a moment how differently we treat scientific claims and texts and discoveries. Isaac Newton went into isolation for 18 months starting in the year 1665. When he came out of his solitude he had invented the calculus; he had discovered the laws of motion and universal gravitation; he had single-handedly created the field of optics. No one thinks this was anything but a man’s labor. And it took 200 hundred years of continuous ingenuity on the part of some of the smartest people who ever lived to substantially improve upon Newton’s work. How difficult would it be to improve the Bible? Anyone in this room could improve this supposedly inerrant text scientifically, historically, ethically, spiritually – in moments. If God loves us and wanted to guide us with a book of morality, it’s very strange to have given us a book that supports slavery, that demands that we murder people for imaginary crimes like witchcraft. The true basis for hope in our world is open-ended conversation, and religion has shattered our world into competing moral communities. What we have to convince ourselves of is – that love and curiosity is enough for us – and intellectual honesty is the guardian of that.”
Sam Harris (born 1967) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sam Harris, “Re-Evolution” Debate, 18/11/2009