Sam Harris

“I wanted to be famous. So famous that I would be vehemently hated by all the people I admired most.”

— Sam Harris

“Despite our attachment to the notion of free will, most of us know that disorders of the brain can trump the best…

— Sam Harris

You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.

— Sam Harris

“A wasteland of embarrassment and social upheaval can be neatly avoided by following a single precept in life: Do not lie.”

— Sam Harris

False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.

— Sam Harris

“Our struggle to navigate the space of possible pains and pleasures produces most of human culture.”

— Sam Harris

Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.

— Sam Harris

“It was finally the obese, inescapable burden of sadness—such a simple word—that finally led to acknowledging and treating my alcoholism.”

— Sam Harris

The problem of human suffering is never too much rational thinking, or too high a demand for evidence. But the solutions are.…

— Sam Harris

“Within a religious framework, a belief in free will supports the notion of sin—which seems to justify not only harsh punishment in…

— Sam Harris

“The truth, however, is that the conflict between religion and science is unavoidable. The success of science often comes at the expense…

— Sam Harris

The perpetrators of the Inquisition - the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions - were ecclesiastics of one rank or…

— Sam Harris

It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate…

— Sam Harris

Could there be any doubt that the Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again, knowing that his body was…

— Sam Harris

On the subject of religious belief, we relax standards of reasonableness and evidence that we rely on in every other area of…

— Sam Harris

You almost never get the pleasure of seeing that you won the argument in real time. People just don't like to publicly…

— Sam Harris

“Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book.…

— Sam Harris

“I am often asked what will replace organized religion. The answer, I believe, is nothing and everything. Nothing need replace its ludicrous…

— Sam Harris

“If being prepared for death entails knowing when and where it will happen, the odds are you will not be prepared. Not…

— Sam Harris

“The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialog with God. If he said…

— Sam Harris

Many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of 'spirituality' or 'mysticism' to be synonymous with mental illness, conscious fraud, or self-deception.…

— Sam Harris

God is great"). Conversations about the practical impossibility of God's existence and the science-based irrationality of an afterlife slid seamlessly into xenophobia…

— Sam Harris

The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention—distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims…

— Sam Harris

“Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door…

— Sam Harris

You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.

— Sam Harris

Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected.

— Sam Harris

Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects.

— Sam Harris

Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim Algebra, we will see tht there is no such thing…

— Sam Harris

We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about…

— Sam Harris

As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending…

— Sam Harris

Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.

— Sam Harris

“The problem with religion is that it blends this truth so thoroughly with the venom of unreason.”

— Sam Harris

To not believe in God is to know that it falls to us to make the world a better place.

— Sam Harris

120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.

— Sam Harris

“A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything in a person’s life.”

— Sam Harris

“...religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse.”

— Sam Harris

“Faith is like a pickpocket who loans a person his own money on generous terms.”

— Sam Harris

We are free to burn the Qur’an or any other book, and to criticize Muhammad or any other human being. Let no…

— Sam Harris

“You have a voice in your head that keeps saying things...haven't you noticed.”

— Sam Harris

Unreason is now ascendant in the United States—in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government.

— Sam Harris