Sam Harris Quotes

Fear is the mother of morality.

Modern morality is all about perception.

If you didn't have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn't be morality but with consciousness that you have it.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

I am not dead inside. I still care about right and wrong.

As for morality, well that's all tied up with the question of consciousness.

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

Force cannot transmit a moral principle: moral ideas can be received only through the reason of the heart.

My parents are naive in their morality of things, and so, without realising it, I landed up being ethical and having strong opinions.

If you ask anyone, what is morality based on? These are the two factors that always come out: One is reciprocity, … a sense of fairness, and the other one is empathy and compassion.

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world - and there clearly are - then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and when people start getting it confused, that means they need to sit down with some real people.

Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

You can't legislate morality.

I've been fascinated by the idea that evil is the absence of empathy.

Ethics are not necessarily to do with being law-abiding. I am very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing.

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

I think that unless you can take judgments of right and wrong like an automaton, you must have emotions because that is our only way of moral guidance.

The fundamental basis of ethics must be chosen in some non-scientific way.

Our system of morals is a body of imperfect social generalizations expressed in terms of emotion.