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People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. The only thing we should respect in a person’s faith is his desire for a better life in this world we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next.

Sam Harris

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Sam Harris
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 9
Author
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LA
California
Samuel Benjamin Harris
Samuel Harris
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More quotes by Sam Harris

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We are faced with the task of convincing a myth infatuated world that love and curiosity are sufficient and you don't have to delude yourself and frighten yourself with Iron Age fairy tales. This is a monumental task. I don't think there is an intellectual struggle more worthy of our efforts.
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Unreason is now ascendant in the United States—in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government.
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In the year 2006, a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get seventy-two virgins in Paradise.
Sam Harris
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The freedom to think out loud on certain topics, without fear of being hounded into hiding or killed, has already been lost.
Sam Harris
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The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms.
Sam Harris
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Many scientists have been drawn to Buddhism out of a sense that the Western tradition has delivered an impoverished conception of basic, human sanity. In the West, if you speak to yourself out loud all day long, you are considered crazy. But speaking to yourself silently - thinking incessantly - is considered perfectly normal.
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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
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As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population.
Sam Harris
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Death is, in some ways, unacceptable. It's just an astonishing fact of our being here that we die but I think worse than that is if we live long enough, we lose everyone we love in this world. I mean people die and disappear, and we're left with this stark mystery: just the sheer not knowing of what happened to them.
Sam Harris
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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
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Countries with high levels of atheism are . . . the most charitable both in terms of the percentage of their wealth they devote to social welfare programs and the percentage they give in aid to the developing world.
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All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the earth.
Sam Harris
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If one doesn't value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?
Sam Harris
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You cannot take death for apostasy seriously and be working for peace.
Sam Harris
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We are now in the 21st century: all books, including the Koran, should be fair game for flushing down the toilet without fear of violent reprisal.
Sam Harris
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Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects.
Sam Harris
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We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence.
Sam Harris
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Unreason is now ascendant in the United States - in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution 68 percent believe in Satan. 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
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An average Christian, in an average church, listen to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse -- and there have been some extraordinary arrogant scientists.
Sam Harris
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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