The Best Sam Harris quotes

The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence. — Sam Harris

We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence. — Sam Harris

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

We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself. — Sam Harris

Moderates want their faith respected. They don’t want faith itself criticized, and yet faith itself is what is bringing us all this–this lunacy. — Sam Harris

Religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty . . . exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the . . . false to achieve primacy over the facts. — Sam Harris

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

Where we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we have lost both our connection to the world and to one another. — Sam Harris

Faith enables many of us to endure life’s difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason. — Sam Harris

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

We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That’s it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper. — Sam Harris

As a man believes, so he will act. — Sam Harris

There is no reason whatsoever to think that Buddhism can compete successfully with the relentless evangelizing of Christianity and Islam. Nor should it try to. — Sam Harris

Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. — Sam Harris

Any conception of human well–being you could plausibly have, the Taliban patently fails to maximize it. — 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 one forget it. — Sam Harris

The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms. — Sam Harris

We’re right to say that a culture that can’t tolerate free speech is… there are a wide range of positive human experiences that are not available in that culture. And we’re right to want those experiences. — Sam Harris

Human experience depends on everything that can influence states of the human brain, ranging from changes in our genome to changes in the global economy. — Sam Harris

This is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own. — Sam Harris

The problem with religion, because it’s been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation. — Sam Harris

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

It’s simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality. — Sam Harris

The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good. — Sam Harris

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

What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody’s beliefs, we evaluate their reasons. — Sam Harris

That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization. — Sam Harris

Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance. — Sam Harris

Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma. — Sam Harris

The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. — Sam Harris

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

I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions. — Sam Harris

It is time we admitted that we are not at war with ‘terrorism.’ We are at war with Islam. — Sam Harris

It is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world. — 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

It is time we recognized that belief is not a private matter; it has never been merely private. In fact, beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is a fount of action in potential. — Sam Harris

It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero–sum. — Sam Harris

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail. — 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 change their minds. They change their minds in private. — Sam Harris

People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. — Sam Harris

I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs. — Sam Harris

The core of science is not a mathematical modeling––it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument. — Sam Harris

What I’m asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives. — Sam Harris

The problem of human suffering is never too much rational thinking, or too high a demand for evidence. But the solutions are. … Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love. — Sam Harris

Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim Algebra, we will see tht there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality. — Sam Harris

We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it. — Sam Harris

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

Muslims must learn that if they make belligerent and fanatical claims upon the tolerance of free societies, they will meet the limits of that tolerance. — Sam Harris

Muslim moderates, wherever they are, must be given every tool necessary to win a war of ideas with their co–religionists. Otherwise, we will have to win some very terrible wars in the future. — Sam Harris