Quote #76

The point at which we fully acquire our humanity, and our capacity to suffer, remains an open question, but anyone who would dogmatically insist that these traits must arise coincident with the moment of conception has nothing to contribute, apart from his ignorance, to this debate.[2]

More from Sam Harris

  1. Our present policy on human stem cells has been shaped by beliefs that are divorced from every reasonable intuition we might form about the…
  2. Those opposed to therapeutic stem-cell research on religious grounds constitute the biological and ethical equivalent of a flat-earth socie…
  3. In this area of public policy alone, the accommodations that we have made to faith will do nothing but enshrine a perfect immensity of huma…
  4. 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.
  5. The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a s…
  6. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan.
  7. Unreason is now ascendant in the United States-in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government.
  8. The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new argume…

All Sam Harris quotes