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Portrait of Sam Harris

Sam Harris

(1967) Religious Studies Scholar United Kingdom

543 quotes in 1854 categories

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Sam Harris is a religious studies scholar from the United Kingdom, best known for What Are You Optimistic About?.

Quick Facts About Sam Harris

Born: April 9, 1967
Nationality: United Kingdom
Profession: Religious Studies Scholar
Notable works: What Are You Optimistic About?

About Sam Harris

Sam Harris is an American neuroscientist, philosopher, author and podcast host who writes about rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, politics, terrorism and artificial intelligence. He became well known for criticizing religion and is often called one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, together with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett.

Quotes by Sam Harris · Page 4

It is important to realize that our inability to answer a question says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer.

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Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.

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There's no way to reconcile Islam with Christianity. This difference of opinion admits of compromise as much as a coin toss does.

Christianity

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What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively…

Chance

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“I fear that my lesson in this lifetime is humility... and I think that lesson is beneath me.”

Humility

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Anyone familiar with my work knows that I am extremely critical of all religious faiths.

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How we pay attention to the present moment...determin es the character of our experience and...the quality of our lives.

Attention

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“What evidence could possibly be put forward to show that one could have acted differently in the past?”

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The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and…

Community

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“Given the link between belief and action, it is clear that we can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than…

Faith

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While liberals are leery of religious fundamentalism in general, they consistently imagine that all religions at their core teach the same thing…

Borne

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There must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On…

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What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have…

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“The concessions we have made to religious faith - to the idea that belief can be sanctified by something other than evidence…

Faith

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“Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is denial - at once…

Denial

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“As long as it is acceptable for a person to believe that he knows how God wants everyone on earth to live,…

Nature

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“if, like many people, you tend to be vaguely unhappy much of the time, it can be very helpful to manufacture a…

Gratitude

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And while Protestant reformers broke with Rome on a variety of counts, their treatment of their fellow human beings was no less…

Ashes

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“Losing a belief in free will has not made me a fatalist - in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom.…

Faith

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“This concept of the afterlife really functions as a substitute for wisdom. It functions as a substitute for really absorbing our predicament,…

Afterlife

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“Give people divergent, irreconcilable, and untestable notions about what happens after death, and then oblige them to live together with limited resources.…

Death

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While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in…

Atheism

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“There are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment, most of them are Hindus, most of them therefore are polytheists. In…

Hinduism

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To speak specifically of our problem with the Muslim world, we are meandering into a genuine clash of civilizations, and we're deluding…

Civilization

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“If pain were all that mattered, it would be as important to protect the rabbits from the foxes as to protect the…

Judaism

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The moment you shift the conversation to God ... you can pretend to know things you absolutely and obviously cannot know.

Anti religious

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“Rather often, to lie is to infringe upon the freedom of those we care about.”

Freedom

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“Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.”

Belief

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“There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of…

Human life

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

Embarrassment

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“We must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it.”

Faith

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In my own case, the most inflammatory statements I have ever made are ones that I have written and remain willing to…

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“Dogma in science really is humiliating when it is recognized as dogma.”

Dogma

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“Word was that God could heal anyone. The wounded, the infirm, even lepers. I figured I should be a breeze.”

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Words like 'God' and 'Allah' must go the way of 'Apollo' and 'Baal' or they will unmake our world.

Allah

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You don't get anything worth getting, by pretending to know things you don't know.

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If one doesn't value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?

Argument

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“I asked God for greater challenges to endure. I should have been more specific.”

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“I was 15 years old and singing “I Miss the Hungry Years.” And I was a little fat.”

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“A total prohibition against lying is also ethically incoherent in anyone but a true pacifist.”

Lying

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Sam Harris by topic

Religion (167) Faith (89) Time (58) People (51) World (46) Religious (44) Life (41) Atheism (39) Atheist (35) Humans (34) Thinking (31) Belief (31) Truth (30) Science (29) Reason (26) Islam (26) Morality (25) Character (25)