Sam Harris Quotes - Page 8

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

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.

Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you, dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well--by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God.

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.

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.

Unreason is now ascendant in the United States—in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government.

Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism. Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse.

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.

Any conception of human well-being you could plausibly have, the Taliban patently fails to maximize it.

According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy, Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.

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

It is time we realize that belief is not a private matter. As a man believes, so he will act. Believe that you are a member of a chosen people, awash in the salacious exports of an evil culture that is turning your children away from God, believe that you will be rewarded with an eternity of unimaginable delights by dealing death to these infidels—and flying a plane into a building is only a matter of being asked to do it.

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

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

Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches.

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).

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

You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps.

Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.

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

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

This is how you play tennis without the net

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?

Could there be any doubt that the Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again, knowing that his body was now readily accessible in the form of defenseless crackers?

Religious faith is the only area of discourse where immunity through conversation is considered noble . It's the only area of our lives where someone can win points for saying, "There's nothing that you can do to change my mind and I'm taking no state of the world ultimately into account in believing what I believe. There's nothing to change about the world that would cause me to revise my beliefs.