Sam Harris

“Anyone familiar with my work knows that I am extremely critical of all religious faiths.”

“In my experience with print journalists, the distinction between remarks being uttered on- or off-the-record is held sacrosanct, but the distinction between truth and falsity sometimes isn't...”

“The moral landscape is the framework I use for thinking about questions of morality and human values in universal terms.”

“It's simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.”

“We're right to say that a culture that can't tolerate free speech is... there are a wide range of positive human experiences that are not available in that culture. And we're right to want t...”

“Religious ideas about good and evil tend to focus on how to achieve well-being in the next life, and this makes them terrible guides to securing it in this one. Of course, there are a few ge...”

“Human experience depends on everything that can influence states of the human brain, ranging from changes in our genome to changes in the global economy.”

“We have Christians against Muslims against Jews, and no matter how liberal your theology, merely identifying yourself as a Christian or a Jew lends tacit validity to this status quo. People...”

“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...”

“The fact that one can lose one's sense of self in an ocean of tranquility does not mean that one's consciousness is immaterial or that it presided over the birth of the universe.”

“The wealthiest Americans often live as though they and their children had nothing to gain from investments in education, infrastructure, clean-energy, and scientific research.”

“On the subject of religious belief, we relax standards of reasonableness and evidence that we rely on in every other area of our lives. We relax so totally that people believe the most ludic...”

“Spiritual life can certainly follow the pattern one sees in the fake martial arts, with most teachers making nebulous and magical claims that never get tested, while their students derange t...”

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

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

“Muslim moderates, wherever they are, must be given every tool necessary to win a war of ideas with their co-religionists. Otherwise, we will have to win some very terrible wars in the future...”

“I was actually already doing my Ph.D. in neuroscience when September 11 happened. 'The End Of Faith' is essentially what September 11 did to my intellectual career at that moment.”

“One of the great responsibilities we have as a society is to educate ourselves, along with the next generation, about which substances are worth ingesting, and for what purpose, and which ar...”

“As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population.”

“Positive social emotions like compassion and empathy are generally good for us, and we want to encourage them. But do we know how to most reliably raise children to care about the suffering...”