Sam Harris Quotes

If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture.

I remember when I was a freshman in college, I was still somewhat bothered by... worried... about religion. I remember going to this professor of philosophy and telling him that I had lost my faith.

When you walk away from God, and you walk away from Christ, you're basically uprooting the very foundations of being. So I don't think there is an easy way to do that. Even for the guy who becomes an atheist out of it, it's messy. It ain't pretty.

A large psychic void is left by a loss of faith. So many Catholics have tried so many things to replace it.

What happened on September 11 compels us to focus on who we are as Americans, what we stand for, what really matters in our lives - family, friends, faith and freedom.

I believed in God my whole life, and then strayed away from it in my teen-age years, until recently.

Galileo was no idiot. Only an idiot could believe that science requires martyrdom - that may be necessary in religion, but in time a scientific result will establish itself.

No doubt it is true that science cannot study God, but it hardly follows that God had to keep a safe distance from everything that scientists want to study.

I want to talk about God in a literary way. But I think I would have a very hard time praying to God.

He, however, who begins with Metaphysics, will not only become confused in matters of religion, but will fall into complete infidelity.

I don't want to give advice to people about their religious beliefs, but I do think that it's not smart to bet against the power of science to figure out the natural world. It used to be, a thousand years ago, that if you wanted to explain why the moon moved through the sky, you needed to invoke God.

Humanists are not characteristically strong in faith, hope and love.

I have always been the kid who's asked 'Why?' In my faith, you're just supposed to have faith. But I was always like 'why?'

You can educate yourself right out of a relationship with God.

Nobody can tell us Christians how to dress, how to live or how to pray.

Plenty of kind, decent, caring people have no religious beliefs, and they act out of the goodness of their hearts. Conversely, plenty of people who profess to be religious, even those who worship regularly, show no particular interest in the world beyond themselves.

It is now widely believed that God is a conservative.

And they would ask, well, now, are you one of those narrow-minded Baptists who think only Baptists are going to heaven? To which I enjoy replying, now actually I'm more narrow than that, I don't think all the Baptists are going to make it.

Revealed religion had no weight with me.

You know, for a long time I became almost atheist. I believed in nothing. And it was tough for me to believe in anything at all because I had believed so strongly. And I divorced myself of spirituality, I think.

9/11 was a sort of hinge event in American history, and all jihadi terrorist plots or attacks are kind of filtered through that lens.

We live in an extremely anxious age in which the core of our beliefs has been undermined to a great extent by scientific thinking.

Since September 11, 2001, the real world has become too scary for a lot of people to be with - all the time.

My father said that I was lower than a dog, because even a dog believes in God.

When I didn't go to church during my first two years in the NFL, I didn't know how it would impact me as a person. It was hard to go six or seven months without church.