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

Sam Harris

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Sam Harris
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 9
Author
Blogger
Neuroscientist
Philosopher
Podcaster
Writer
LA
California
Samuel Benjamin Harris
Samuel Harris
Dangerous
Belief
May
Even
Believe
Propositions
People
Ethical
Believing
Kill

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good.
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An argument can be logically valid, but unsound in that it contains a false premise and, therefore, leads to a false conclusion (e.g., Scientists are smart smart people do not make mistakes therefore, scientists do not make mistakes).
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We are all prisoners of our thoughts.
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The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.
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The second commandment is Thou shall not construct any graven images. Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity?
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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.
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We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.
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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.
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People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.
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The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.
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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.
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As a man believes, so he will act.
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We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas
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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.
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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.
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You can't take credit for your talents, but it matters that you use them. You can't really be blamed for your weaknesses, but it matters that you correct them. So pride and shame don't make a lot of sense, in the final analysis, but they weren't much fun anyway.
Sam Harris
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It is easy to see what many people, women especially, admire about Sarah Palin. Here is a mother of five who can see the bright side of having a child with Down syndrome and still find the time and energy to govern the state of Alaska.
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It is still fashionable to believe that how you organize yourself religiously in this life may matter for eternity. Unless we can erode the prestige of that kind of thinking, we're not going to be able to undermine these divisions in our world.
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