525 Quotes by Sam Harris

Confusion and suffering may be our birthright, but wisdom and happiness are available.

The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention – distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence – is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity – a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible.

How would your relationships change if you resolved never to lie again? What truths about yourself might suddenly come into view? What kind of person would you become? And how might you change the people around you? It is worth finding out.

We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.

Over one million people died in the orgy of religious killing that attended the partitioning of India and Pakistan. The two countries have since fought three official wars, suffered a continuous bloodletting at their shared border, and are now poised to exterminate one another with nuclear weapons simply because they disagree about “facts” that are every bit as fanciful as the names of Santa’s reindeer.

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?

Fundamentalism is only a problem if the fundamentals are a problem.

Consciousness is the one thing in the universe that cannot be an illusion – even if I’m a brain in a vat, all my memories are false, and my perceptions are of a world that doesn’t exist, I’m still having an experience.

Every moment of the day – indeed, every moment throughout one’s life – offers an opportunity to be relaxed and responsive or to suffer unnecessarily.