Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain -- from cosmology to psychology to economics -- has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture. Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.

— Sam Harris

Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel love and avoid loneliness…. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts. Every waking moment, and even in our dreams, we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition towards states of consciousness that we value.

— Sam Harris

Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.

— Sam Harris

Faith is like a pickpocket who loans a person his own money on generous terms.

— Sam Harris

Faith is the mortar that fills the cracks in the evidence and the gaps in the logic, and thus it is faith that keeps the whole terrible edifice of religious certainty still looming dangerously over our world.

— Sam Harris

False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.

— Sam Harris

Habitual identification with discursive thought is the source of human suffering

— Sam Harris

Honesty can force any dysfunction in your life to the surface. Are you in an abusive relationship? A refusal to lie to others – How did you get that bruise? – would oblige you to come to grips with this situation very quickly. Do you have a problem with drugs or alcohol? Lying is the lifeblood of addiction. If we have no recourse to lies, our lives can unravel only so far without others noticing. Telling the truth can also reveal ways in which we want to grow but haven’t.

— Sam Harris

How can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t.

— Sam Harris

Ideas matter—and philosophy is the art of thinking about them rigorously. In my view, that should be done in as public a forum as possible.

— Sam Harris