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Exlpore more Ethics quotes

"The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble."

"At certain moments, the foot slips ; at others, the ground gives way. How many times had that conscience, furious for the right, grasped and overwhelmed him! How many times had truth, inexorable, planted her knee upon his breast! How many times, thrown to the ground by the light, had he cried to it for mercy!"

"Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices has never been more pressing-or more complicated-than it is today."

"There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty."

"Messages of instant gratification leads to a corrupt society."
Explore more quotes by Sam Harris


"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."


"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."


"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."


"If there is any kernel of truth in the religions we so deplore,and they are just a carnival of errors,the truth is that it's possible to sink into the present moment in such a way as to find it sacred and to cease to have a problem."


"What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives."


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


"The only differences between a cult and a religion are the numbers of adherents and the degree to which they are marginalized by the rest of society."


"Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?"


"Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism.Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse."
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