Quotes by Sam Harris

“Its going to be great for the entire downtown.”

“It should create lots more walk-around traffic. You can walk to the movies, you can walk to Kaiser Grill or the Chop House or my place, you can walk to the Spa casino. Theres just a lot more out here than there used to be.”

“If we pass the test tonight, well continue to evaluate on a daily basis.”

“All of the problems that have existed in Benton Harbor were existing last week and the week before and the year before, and they werent here then, ... They dont need to come now.”

“It was very violent, ... We had gunfire. They shot at our trucks, they shot at the captain of police, ran barricades.”

“The End of Faith”

“Comos probably never going to stay the same. This is home though. And I can never say that Im going to a better place. Well survive.”

“Its going to be a car show for people who dont ordinarily go to car shows. There will be lots of things for mom and the kids to do.”

“If youre out of school sick and youre sitting outside on the porch getting some air, thats one thing.”

“I think its just a case in the second half where we stopped penetrating and dishing the ball out. Were an effective team when we do that. We just played the way Union wanted us to - or probably better put, the way they made us.”

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?

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, atheism is a term that should not even exist. No one 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 cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.

The problem with religion, because its been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.

Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic—in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling how much I might change in the future. Just as one wouldn’t draw a lasting conclusion about oneself on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn’t do so on the basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past. A creative change of inputs to the system—learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention—may radically transform one’s life.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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?

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.