Quote

My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own. That's not to say that all religious people are lunatics or idiots. It's anything but that.

Sam Harris

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Sam Harris
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 9
Author
Blogger
Neuroscientist
Philosopher
Podcaster
Writer
LA
California
Samuel Benjamin Harris
Samuel Harris
People
Allows
Idiot
Concern
Millions
Religious
Religion
Anything
Lunatics
Believe
Idiots

More quotes by Sam Harris

Image
A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.
Sam Harris
Image
False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.
Sam Harris
Image
Many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of 'spirituality' or 'mysticism' to be synonymous with mental illness, conscious fraud, or self-deception. I have argued elsewhere that this is a problem - because millions of people have had experiences for which 'spiritual' and 'mystical' seem the only terms available.
Sam Harris
Image
Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.
Sam Harris
Image
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
Image
What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about 'right' and 'wrong,' or 'good' and 'evil,' and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?
Sam Harris
Image
Principle #1: Avoid dangerous people and dangerous places. Principle #2: Do not defend your property. Principle #3: Respond immediately and escape.
Sam Harris
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love
Sam Harris
Image
There's no way to reconcile Islam with Christianity. This difference of opinion admits of compromise as much as a coin toss does.
Sam Harris
Image
George Bush says he speaks to god every day, & Christians love him for it. If George Bush said he spoke to god through his hair dryer, they would think he was mad. I fail to see how the addition of a hair dryer makes it any more absurd.
Sam Harris
Image
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
Image
We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas
Sam Harris
Image
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).
Sam Harris
Image
We are all prisoners of our thoughts.
Sam Harris
Image
The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It's really no more inflammatory than that.
Sam Harris
Image
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
Image
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
Image
While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its liabilities. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us incapable of criticizing ideas that are now patently absurd and increasingly maladaptive.
Sam Harris