Sam Harris Quotes

You may have noticed that the less I know about a subject the more confidence I have, and the more new light I throw on it.

A common fallacy: to imagine a measure will be easy because we have private motives for desiring it.

In other words, the more stupid one is, the more he thinks he knows.

It is a tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn't know - the less a man knows, the more sure it is that he knows everything.

I.Q. deficiency. There are some people who are an order of fries short of a Happy Meal, and what is often a characteristic about every one of these people is that they don't know it. They have no idea how incompetent or stupid they are. It's the exact opposite. They have the loftiest, highest self-image.

Thinking you know when in fact you don't is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone

I think the problem with people like this is that they are so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are.

Ignorance and confidence are constant companions

Confidence is ignorance. If you're feeling cocky, it's because there's something you don't know.

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.

Idiots don't know they're idiots, which is unfortunate.

Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.

People assign much higher probability to the truth of their opinions than is warranted.

We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.

People are drastically overconfident about their judgments of others.

When you think you're right, you're most likely wrong.

Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't.

When told that man lives in delusion everyone thinks of himself as the exception; hence his delusion.

The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it.

When ignorance does not know something, it says that what it does not know is stupid.

A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessments of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.

When you're certain you cannot be fooled, you become easy to fool.

One never quite allows for the moron in our midst.

To be infatuated with the power of one's own intellect is an accident which seldom happens but to those who are remarkable for the want of intellectual power. Whenever Nature leaves a hole in a person's mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.