110+ Sam Harris Quotes On Religion, Free Will And God

Sam Harris is an American author, philosopher, neuroscientist, and podcast host. He is best known for his books on spirituality, religion, and science, including The End of Faith and Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. He is also the co-founder and CEO of the meditation app, Waking Up. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Sam Harris on life, religion, love.

Top 10 Sam Harris Quotes

1. Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn't care to, or he doesn't exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick, and choose wisely.
2. A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.
3. We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That's it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper.
4. The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you.
5. It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.
6. People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.
7. What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.
8. Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.
9. 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.
10. Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education.

Sam Harris Short Quotes

• We are all prisoners of our thoughts.
• I'm the Ted Bundy of string theory.
• Let me assure you that my intent is not to offend or merely be provocative. I'm simply worried.
• Fundamentalism is only a problem if the fundamentals are a problem
• We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas
• The truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death.
• As a man believes, so he will act.
• Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.
• It is time we admitted that we are not at war with “terrorism.” We are at war with Islam.
• You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.

Sam Harris Quotes About Life

What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives. — Sam Harris

Faith enables many of us to endure life's difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason. — Sam Harris

The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors. — Sam Harris

There must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life. — Sam Harris

If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won't matter how successful you become or who is in your life - you won't enjoy any of it. — Sam Harris

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

Sam Harris Quotes About Religion

When considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn't. Religion is one area of our lives where people imagine that some other standard of intellectual integrity applies. — Sam Harris

We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself. — Sam Harris

Religious faith obscures uncertainty where uncertainty . . . exists, allowing the unknown, the implausible, and the . . . false to achieve primacy over the facts. — Sam Harris

Theology is ignorance with wings. — Sam Harris

[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions. — Sam Harris

The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence. — Sam Harris

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. — Sam Harris

If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have . . . a recipe for the fall of civilization. — Sam Harris

It is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience. — Sam Harris

I think when you say to someone You are fool not to believe in evolution or a fool to believe the universe is 6000 years old. I think that gets translated as You are a fool to think that your daughter who died in a car accident is really in heaven with god. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes About Love

George Bush says he speaks to god every day, & Christians love him for it. If George Bush said he spoke to god through his hair dryer, they would think he was mad. I fail to see how the addition of a hair dryer makes it any more absurd. — Sam Harris

Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love — Sam Harris

The problem of human suffering is never too much rational thinking, or too high a demand for evidence. But the solutions are. ... Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love. — Sam Harris

From my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings. — Sam Harris

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

Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime? — Sam Harris

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. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes About Free Will

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. — Sam Harris

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics. — Sam Harris

Muslims must learn that if they make belligerent and fanatical claims upon the tolerance of free societies, they will meet the limits of that tolerance. — Sam Harris

You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do. — Sam Harris

How can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes About God

When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don't believe as you do. — Sam Harris

We have Christians against Muslims against Jews. They're making incompatible claims on real estate in the Middle East as though God were some kind of omniscient real estate broker parsing out parcels of land to his chosen flock. People are literally dying over ancient literature. — Sam Harris

The perpetrators of the Inquisition - the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions - were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God - popes, bishops, friars, and priests. — Sam Harris

When someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we're told that? God is mysterious. — Sam Harris

Everyone who has eyes to see can see that if the God of Abraham exists, He is an utter psychopath--and the God of Nature too. If you can't see these things just by looking, you have simply closed your eyes to the realities of our world. — Sam Harris

Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a thelogically defensible reading of the Bible. — Sam Harris

Words like 'God' and 'Allah' must go the way of 'Apollo' and 'Baal' or they will unmake our world. — Sam Harris

To not believe in God is to know that it falls to us to make the world a better place. — Sam Harris

We know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man. — Sam Harris

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? — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes About Consciousness

Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures. — Sam Harris

Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds - and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. — Sam Harris

Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes About Faith

Although many things can be said in criticism of religious faith, there is no discounting its power. Millions among us, even now, are quite willing to die for our unjustified beliefs, and millions more, it seems, are willing to kill for them. — Sam Harris

I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs. — Sam Harris

Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction. — Sam Harris

Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world. — Sam Harris

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. — Sam Harris

‎Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident — Sam Harris

We rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes About Reason

We do not respect people's beliefs, we evaluate their reasons. If my reasons are good enough for believing what I believe, you will helplessly believe what I believe. I will give you my reasons and reasons are contagious. That is what it is to be a rational human being. — Sam Harris

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. — Sam Harris

A true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time, and that such ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the self. — Sam Harris

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

Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world. — Sam Harris

The fact that my continuous and public rejection of Christianity does not worry me in the least should suggest to you just how inadequate I think your reasons for being a Christian are. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Quotes About Science

The core of science is not a mathematical modeling--it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument. — Sam Harris

The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It's really no more inflammatory than that. — Sam Harris

The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments , and a passionate unwillingness to do so. — Sam Harris

If Jesus does come down out of the clouds like a superhero, Christianity will stand revealed as a science . That will be the science of Christianity. — Sam Harris

Sam Harris Famous Quotes And Sayings

If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic? — Sam Harris

The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics. — Sam Harris

The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not "cowards," as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith—perfect faith, as it turns out—and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be. — Sam Harris

Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being. Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept. — Sam Harris

The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive. — Sam Harris

Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship. — Sam Harris

About 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent deity. — Sam Harris

One of the worst things about breaking the law is that it puts one at odds with an indeterminate number of other people. This is among the many corrosive effects of having unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically blameless. — Sam Harris

It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window. — Sam Harris

Unfortunately, failure enjoys a natural advantage. Wrong answers to any problem outnumber right ones by a wide margin, and it seems that it will always be easier to break things than to fix them. — Sam Harris

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

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. — Sam Harris

The habit of spending nearly every waking moment lost in thought leaves us at the mercy of whatever our thoughts happen to be. Meditation is a way of breaking this spell. — Sam Harris

False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose. — Sam Harris

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

The principal tenet of Jainism is non-harming. Observant Jains will literally not harm a fly. Fundamentalist Jainism and fundamentalist Islam do not have the same consequences, neither logically nor behaviorally. — Sam Harris

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. — Sam Harris

Recently , crowds of thousands gathered throughout the Muslim world - burning European embassies, issuing threats, taking hostages, even killing people - in protest over twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that were first published in a Danish newspaper. When was the last atheist riot? — Sam Harris

The most transformative experiences people have - bliss, devotion, self transcendence - are currently anchored to the worst parts of culture and to ways of thinking that merely amplify superstition, self-deception, and conflict. — Sam Harris

The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific notions of martyrdom and jihad that fully explain the character of Muslim violence. — Sam Harris

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. — Sam Harris

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

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

One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced. — Sam Harris

It seems to me patently obvious that we can no more respect and tolerate vast differences in notions of human well-being than we can respect or tolerate vast differences in the notions about how disease spreads, or in the safety standards of buildings and airplanes. — Sam Harris

A person who believes that Elvis is still alive is very unlikely to get promoted to a position of great power and responsibility in our society. Neither will a person who believes that the holocaust was a hoax. But people who believe equally irrational things about God and the bible are now running our country. This is genuinely terrifying. — Sam Harris

There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality. — Sam Harris

It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for. — Sam Harris

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

The power of psychedelics... is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime. — Sam Harris

We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses. And then we come across another of God’s teachings on morality: if a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father’s doorstep (Deuteronomy 22:13-21). — Sam Harris

Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe. — Sam Harris

Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue. — Sam Harris

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

The only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation. — Sam Harris

The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia ago-and who seems to have abandoned them to bloodshed in his name ever since-is no one to consult on questions of ethics. — Sam Harris

It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization. — Sam Harris

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

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

Ten years have now passed since many of us first felt the jolt of history-when the second plane crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. We knew from that moment that things can go terribly wrong in our world-not because life is unfair, or moral progress impossible, but because we have failed, generation after generation, to abolish the delusions of our ignorant ancestors. — Sam Harris

Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything -- anything -- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in. — Sam Harris

Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe — Sam Harris

To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say that I would have lived in a different universe had I been in a different universe. — Sam Harris

Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected. — Sam Harris

It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion—to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions and religious diversions of scarce resources—is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity. — Sam Harris

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

We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us. — Sam Harris

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. — Sam Harris

How can we encourage other human beings to extend their moral sympathies beyond a narrow locus? How can we learn to become mere human beings, shorn of any more compelling national, ethnic, or religious identity? We can be reasonable. It is in the very nature of reason to fuse cognitive and moral horizons. Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love. — Sam Harris

You almost never get the pleasure of seeing that you won the argument in real time. People just don't like to publicly change their minds. They change their minds in private. — Sam Harris

Jesus Christ—who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens—can now be eaten in the form of a cracker — Sam Harris

In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist." We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. — Sam Harris

Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standard of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world. — Sam Harris

You don't get anything worth getting, by pretending to know things you don't know. — Sam Harris

Principle #1: Avoid dangerous people and dangerous places. Principle #2: Do not defend your property. Principle #3: Respond immediately and escape. — Sam Harris

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them. — Sam Harris

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. — Sam Harris

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). — Sam Harris

Science has long been in the value business. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; rather, scientific validity is the result of scientists making their best efforts to value principles of reasoning that link their beliefs to reality, through reliable chains of evidence and argument. — Sam Harris

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). — Sam Harris

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. — Sam Harris

Life Lessons by Sam Harris

1. Sam Harris encourages us to take responsibility for our own lives and decisions, and to strive to be the best version of ourselves.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of being mindful and aware of our thoughts and emotions, and to be conscious of how our actions affect the world around us.
3. Finally, Harris encourages us to be open to learning and growing, and to actively seek out knowledge and wisdom from a variety of sources.