525 Quotes by Sam Harris

Fundamentalism is only a problem if the fundamentals are a problem

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

The treatment of women in Muslim communities throughout the world is unconscionable. All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the Earth.

Indeed, what is startling about the notion of a victimless crime is that even when the behavior in question is genuinely victimless, its criminality is still affirmed by those who are eager to punish it. It is in such cases that the true genius lurking behind many of our laws stands revealed. The idea of a victimless crime is nothing more than a judicial reprise of the Christian notion of sin.

Islam, at the moment, is the motherlode of bad ideas.

The only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.

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.

I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror.

Religion has convinced us that there's something else entirely other than concerns about suffering. There's concerns about what God wants, there's concerns about what's going to happen in the afterlife.