Sam Harris Quotes

“Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said: Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will (Man can do what he will but he cannot will what he wills).”
― Albert Einstein

“I’ve often wondered how the term “'New Atheism”' gained such currency. It is a misnomer. There is nothing new about nonbelief. All of us, without exception, are born knowing nothing of God or gods, and acquire notions of religion solely through interaction with others – or, most often, indoctrination by others, an indoctrination usually commencing well before we can reason. Our primal state is, thus, one of nonbelief. The New Atheists (most prominently Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens) have, in essence, done nothing more than try to bring us back to our senses, to return us to a pure and innate mental clarity.”
― Jeffrey Tayler

“There is never a moment where I find Trump persuasive. When I look at him I see a man without any inner life. I see the most superficial person on Earth. This is a guy who has been totally hollowed out by greed and self regard and delusion. If I caught some sort of brain virus and I started talking about myself the way Trump talks about himself, I would throw myself out a fucking window. That barely overstates it. Do you remember that scene at the end of The Exorcist where the priest is driving out the devil from Linda Blair and the devil comes into him and he just hurls himself out the window to end all the madness? Well, it would be like that.”
― Sam Harris

“Absurdity is the best cure for adversity.”
― P.J. Skinner

“Your capacity to be offended, isn’t something that I or anyone else needs to respect.
Your capacity to be offended isn’t something you should respect, in fact, it’s something you should be on your guard for, perhaps more than any other property of your mind.
This feeling can mislead you.
If you care about justice (and you absolutely should) you should care about facts and the ability to discuss them openly.
Justice requires contact with reality.
It simply isn’t the case, it cannot be the case, that the most pressing claims on our sense of justice need come from those who claim to be most offended by conversation itself.
So I’m going to speak in the language of facts now, insofar as we know them, all the while knowing that these facts run very much counter to most peoples’ assumptions.
(ep #207 Waking Up podcast)”
― Sam Harris

“Scientists would much rather contemplate indeterminism than free will because then they can continue to avoid any notion of mind existing in its own right. The entire way scientists think is predicated on ensuring that meaning, purpose, mind, teleology, and free will never enter their thoughts or theories. It’s literally verboten to allow these to enter science. Science is an ideology. It’s utterly dogmatic. It has an absolutely rigid and wrong worldview that it refuses to alter. It’s as bad as Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Karmism. The way Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Sam Harris and Brian Cox contemplate the world is from the primary assumption that mind, teleology and free will are false. So, it’s no surprise whatsoever to find these people arguing against mind, teleology and free will. They have to in order to cling to their quasi-religious faith in scientific materialism.”
― Mike Hockney, Free Will and Will to Power

“why is he torturing logic in order to rescue his rightness from the evidence?”
― Bret Weinstein

“Sam crossed her fingers and hoped that Gloria could be distracted from her hopeless quest of the successful Diego by a successful quest for the hopeless Alfredo.”
― P.J. Skinner, Fool's Gold

“We need an Age of Philosophers, of Enlightenment, an Age of Reason and Intellect, of Logic and Ontological Mathematics. Only then will we have the launchpad that can make Gods of us, and bring to fruition a Star Trek world where we travel through the galaxies to the heavens themselves. There’s nothing in the dreary, nihilistic, atheistic vision of scientific sophistry peddled by the likes of Sam Harris that could ever transform the human race. Humanity needs the right experts to lead it, not the wrong ones: not the charlatans, gurus and glory hunters.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“Harris expects us to dismiss free will as an illusion, whilst he fails to comprehend that he has generated a much greater mystery, namely, if matter can’t be free, how on earth can it suffer from delusions and illusions that it is free? Why are illusions of free will more scientifically plausible than free will? Where’s the scientific theory for this? There simply isn’t one. Harris has proposed that the “rational” alternative to free will is collections of atoms subject to mental illness.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“The very fact that we believe ourselves free, means, by the strict application of Occam’s Razor, that we are free. To argue otherwise is to make the insane claim that the real world, for no conceivable reason or purpose, invents illusions. If that were true, we could never know anything at all because absolutely everything could be an illusion. We would be living in the fantasy world created by Descartes’ malevolent demon. In rather similar terms, fundamentalist materialists propose that a more rational alternative to the concept of “God”, which they say explains nothing, is scientific randomness. However, randomness also explains nothing since it operates via miracles happening for no reason, and is even more of a mystery than God!”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“No one denies that we are influenced by genes and environment. What is denied is that we are determined by our genes and/or environment, that we are literally puppets that cannot act differently, that we have no moral agency, no personal accountability, that we are mere machines. No one who accepts the eternity of the soul can regard our current body, and current environment, as what makes us what we are. Only atheists and materialists hold such ideas. To deny free will is to deny the soul. Without the soul, we would indeed be machines. To put it another way, the reality of free will is the proof of the existence of the soul (since free will is impossible otherwise).
People such as Sam Harris require free will to be false because, if it isn’t, his materialist belief system is false.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion