Sam Harris Quotes

Let me say the good are often punished unfairly.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

When I was in my 20s it did occur to me that there was something perverted about an attitude that thought that killing somebody was a minor offence compared to kissing somebody.

I've always hated criminals and crime. Life is hard enough without someone walking into your life on purpose and making it worse.

I am not saying that factory farming is the same as the Holocaust or the slave trade, but it's clear that there is an immense amount of suffering in it, and just as we think that the Nazis were wrong to ignore the suffering of their victims, so we are wrong to ignore the sufferings of our victims.

Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.

If you look at any religious description of hell, it is the same as human society, the way we dream. Hell is a place of suffering, a place of fear, a place of war and violence, a place of judgment and no justice, a place of punishment that never ends.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it.

If you ever get twenty-five years for nothing, if you find yourself wearing four number patches on your clothes, holding your hands permanently behind your back, submitting to searches morning and evening, working until you are utterly exhausted, dragged into the cooler whenever someone denounces you, trodden deeper and deeper into the ground-from the hole you're in, the fine words of the great humanists will sound like the chatter of the well-fed and free.

I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don’t want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: “The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.

You're punishing him over and over for things that are out of his control.

There is too much undissolved wrath and punishment in most religions.

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it.

All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can't judge if it's simple, but I know it's true.

It a wretched thing to suffer at the hand of one of whom we cannot complain.

Suffering gives us no special rights.

One ought not to return injustice, nor do evil to anybody in the world, no matter what one may have suffered from them.

It's the same in real life: Notorious murderers get off scot-free and live happily all their lives, while good people die - sometimes the very best people. That's the way of the world.

Every great example of punishment has in it some injustice, but the suffering individual is compensated by the public good.

Blessed are the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on.

Destroy all creatures for thy sport or gust, Yet cry, if man's unhappy, God's unjust.