Sam Harris Quotes

Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.

There being no absolute and universal standard of right, terrorism must be held to be wrong in every case.

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

There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

But the imposition of morality onto science, - where it does not belong - has become rampant in recent years.

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

Surely, nothing can be more dangerous than the doctrine that the moral obligations of men change with the latitude and longitude of a place.

I want to give moral relativism the good spanking it deserves.

Moral principles do not depend on a majority vote. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong. Right is right, even if nobody is right.

The moral earth, too, is round! The moral earth, too, has its antipodes! The antipodes, too, have their right to exist! There is still another world to be discovered--and more than one! Set sail, you philosophers!

Either what we hold to be right and good and true IS right and good and true, for all mankind, or we're just another robber tribe.

Some people want tolerance to mean now that all ideas are equally valid. That's nonsense. There are some things that are right and there are some things that are wrong.

I think evil is very relative.

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that morality is not just a matter of opinion.

Modern morality is all about perception.

Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.

Is there one specific source that determines correct morality and everybody should follow that? Or should individuals come up with following that source or not depending on their situation?

The literary depiction of life and its moral dilemmas compel us to use our conscience, to make those infallible distinctions between right and wrong.

Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?

At the descriptive level, certainly, you would expect different cultures to develop different sorts of ethics and obviously they have; that doesn't mean that you can't think of overarching ethical principles you would want people to follow in all kinds of places.

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

I began graduate school in the late 1980s, and my goal was to understand how morality varied across cultures and nations. I did some research comparing moral judgment in India and the U.S.A.

I consistently encounter people in academic settings and scientists and journalists who feel that you can't say that anyone is wrong in any deep sense about morality, or with regard to what they value in life. I think this doubt about the application of science and reason to questions of value is really quite dangerous.