Sam Harris · 291 pages
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“Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“If our well-being depends upon the interaction between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, then some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others; some political persuasions will be more enlightened than others; and some world views will be mistaken in ways that cause needless human misery.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“our moral reasoning is plagued by two illusions. The first illusion can be called the wag-the-dog illusion: We believe that our own moral judgment (the dog) is driven by our own moral reasoning (the tail). The second illusion can be called the wag-theother-dog's-tail illusion: In a moral argument, we expect the successful rebuttal of an opponent's arguments to change the opponent's mind. Such a belief is like thinking that forcing a dog's tail to wag by moving it with your hand will make the dog happy.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim Algebra, we will see tht there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“We will embarrass our descendants, just as our ancestors embarrass us. This is moral progress.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“The fact that millions of people use the term "morality" as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“it seems profoundly unlikely that our universe has been designed to reward individual primates for killing one another while believing in the divine origin of a specific book.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“the Vatican is an organization that excommunicates women for attempting to become priests13 but does not excommunicate male priests for raping children.14 It excommunicates doctors who perform abortions to save a mother’s life—even if the mother is a nine-year-old girl raped by her stepfather and pregnant with twins15—but it did not excommunicate a single member of the Third Reich for committing genocide.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“Anyone who wants to understand the world should be open to new facts and new arguments, even on subjects where his or her views are very well established. Similarly, anyone truly interested in morality—in the principles of behavior that allow people to flourish—should be open to new evidence and new arguments that bear upon questions of happiness and suffering. Clearly, the chief enemy of open conversation is dogmatism in all its forms. Dogmatism”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying attention to what it is actually like to be what we are. The moment we do pay attention, we begin to see that free will is nowhere to be found, and our subjectivity is perfectly compatible with this truth. Thoughts and actions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do? The truth about us is stranger than many suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“most of the research done on happiness suggests that people actually become less happy when they have children and do not begin to approach their prior level of happiness until their children leave home.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us. Cancer is perfectly natural, and yet its eradication is a primary goal of modern medicine. Evolution may have selected for territorial violence, rape, and other patently unethical behaviors as strategies to propagate one’s genes—but our collective well-being clearly depends on our opposing such natural tendencies.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“To point out nonepistemic motives in another’s view of the world, therefore, is always a criticism, as it serves to cast doubt upon a person’s connection to the world as it is.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures—and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain. Rational, open-ended, honest inquiry has always been the true source of insight into such processes. Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“Despite our perennial bad behavior, our moral progress seems to me unmistakable.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“But while having some choice is generally good, it seems that having too many options tends to undermine our feelings of satisfaction, no matter which option we choose.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“there is almost nothing more common than the belief that one is above average in intelligence, wisdom, honesty, etc.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“Смисълът, ценностите, моралът и добрият живот по необходимост са свързани с факти, свързани с благосъ
стояниетона съзнателни същества – и в нашия случай би трябвало да зависят закономерно от събития във външния свят и от състояния на човешкия мозък. Рационалното, непредубедено и
почтено изследване винаги е било единственият източник на познание
в подобни процеси. Вярата – ако изобщо може да се окаже права за нещо – е права само по случайност.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“it seems to me that, on balance, soul/body dualism has been the enemy of compassion. For instance, the moral stigma that still surrounds disorders of mood and cognition seems largely the result of viewing the mind as distinct from the brain. When the pancreas fails to produce insulin, there is no shame in taking synthetic insulin to compensate for its lost function.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“Choosing beliefs freely is not what rational minds do.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“I want to maximize my happiness, but I am generally not moved to do what I believe will make me happier than I now am.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“Knowing what a person believes on a certain subject is not identical to knowing how that person thinks.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“The moment one begins thinking about morality in terms of well-being, it becomes remarkably easy to discern a moral hierarchy across human societies.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“Clearly, one of the great tasks of civilization is to create cultural mechanisms that protect us from the moment-to-moment failures of our ethical intuitions.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“It makes no sense at all to have the most important features of our lives anchored to divisive claims about the unique sanctity of ancient books or to rumors of ancient miracles. There”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“According to a recent poll, 36 percent of British Muslims (ages sixteen to twenty-four) think apostates should be put to death for their unbelief.60 Are these people “morally motivated,” in Haidt’s sense, or just morally confused? And”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“the 2.5 billion seconds that make up the average human”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
Sam Harris
Born place: in The United States
Born date April 9, 1967
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“To discourage future dark moments, I believe we must nourish the minds of our young with learning that creates understanding between ethnic and religious groups.”
― Jean Sasson, quote from Growing Up Bin Laden: Osama's Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World
“In the U.S. Articles of Confederation, the federal government gave itself the exclusive right to regulate “the trade and managing all affairs with the Indians.” This power was repeated in the 1790 Trade and Intercourse Act, which further refined “trade” and “affairs” to include the purchase and sale of Indian land.
The intent of these two pieces of legislation was clear. Whatever powers states were to have, those powers did not extend to Native peoples.
Beginning in 1823, there would be three U.S. Supreme Court decisions—Johnson v. McIntosh, Cherokee v. Georgia, Worcester v. Georgia—that would confirm the powers that the U.S. government had unilaterally taken upon itself and spell out the legal arrangement that tribes were to be allowed.
1823. Johnson v. McIntosh. The court decided that private citizens could not purchase land directly from Indians. Since all land in the boundaries of America belonged to the federal government by right of discovery, Native people could sell their land only to the U.S. government. Indians had the right of occupancy, but they did not hold legal title to their lands.
1831. Cherokee v. Georgia. The State of Georgia attempted to extend state laws to the Cherokee nation. The Cherokee argued that they were a foreign nation and therefore not subject to the laws of Georgia. The court held that Indian tribes were not sovereign, independent nations but domestic, dependent nations.
1832. Worcester v. Georgia. This case was a follow-up to Cherokee v. Georgia. Having determined that the Cherokee were a domestic, dependent nation, the court settled the matter of jurisdiction, ruling that the responsibility to regulate relations with Native nations was the exclusive prerogative of Congress and the federal government.
These three cases unilaterally redefined relationships between Whites and Indians in America. Native nations were no longer sovereign nations. Indians were reduced to the status of children and declared wards of the state. And with these decisions, all Indian land within America now belonged to the federal government. While these rulings had legal standing only in the United States, Canada would formalize an identical relationship with Native people a little later in 1876 with the passage of the Indian Act. Now it was official. Indians in all of North America were property.”
― Thomas King, quote from The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
“I fucking loved him and I hated it. I hated him for making me love him. I hated Kyle for leaving me alone so many nights for so many years. And mostly I just hated myself for doing this to all of us.”
― Adriane Leigh, quote from The Mourning After
“I almost fell off my stool. Not because I didn't think he loved Shaw, or that he would make an awesome husband, but because he was my impulsive, wild, unhinged little brother. Rule was not a guy that I ever thought would settle into the role of responsible homeowner and faithful husband. I just stared at him until he got mad and snapped.”
― Jay Crownover, quote from Rome
“My mother always says that love is like a snakebite, a venom slowly spreading through your veins.”
― Cynthia Hand, quote from Radiant
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