Sam Harris Quotes

Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don't have all the answers to think that they do.

The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do.

The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms... The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.

The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.

A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.

When a man is required to believe certain doctrines, he is not free to think. A creed is to keep the mind from inquiry. Questions lead to doubt, and doubt is the death of faith.

The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought.

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion, as to think himself wiser than the wisest who think differently from him.

It is always more difficult to fight against faith than against knowledge.

What happens when we put belief in front of reason? When we even put belief above human life?

We cannot infer that because sciences of things divine and human are full of controversies and quarrels, therefore their whole subject-matter is uncertain ; for there have been many persons so enamoured of contradiction, as to turn into ridicule geometrical axioms.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

No one has the right to destroy another person's belief by demanding empirical evidence.

The best thing about science is that hard, empirical answers are always there if you look hard enough. The best thing about religion is that the very absence of that certainty is what requires - and gives rise to - deep feelings of faith.

It appears to be in the nature of religion itself to be prejudiced against those who are different.

Superstition is only the fear of belief, while religion is the confidence.

I took religion much too seriously, however, and its overall effect was depressing. I would have really liked to discard it, but somehow I couldn't.

In the forefront of science, there is not much difference between religion and science. People harbor beliefs. That's what happens when people believe something religiously.

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world.

Truth is truth, whether labeled 'science' or 'religion.'

Your mom was right when she told you never to discuss politics and religion because emotions run so high in those arenas. Especially religion.

People who dismiss science in favor of religion sometimes confuse the challenge of rigorously understanding the world with a deliberate intellectual exclusion that leads them to mistrust scientists and, to their detriment, what they discover.

I think that there's a strain in journalism that believes that anyone who surrenders him- or herself to faith and to belief necessarily checks reason and rationality at the door.