Guy Harrison > Guy's Quotes

“Find joy in existence. We live in good times. Now is somewhere between the beginning and the end of everything. . . . Collectively and individually, we must never stop exploring, imagining, experimenting, learning, and solving problems. This should not be difficult for any of us, because it is only human to do these things. This is who we are. It was the way of those remarkable Africans not so long ago in prehistory, and it can be your way now. The closer you look, the more you will see. The more you learn, the more alive and awake you will become.”
― Guy P. Harrison, At Least Know This: Essential Science to Enhance Your Life

“We all believe silly things. What matters is how silly and how many.”
― Guy P. Harrison, 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True

“You are not the sum of your Google searches, Amazon purchases, and Facebook likes. Your online activities should not define you as a person. But, increasingly, they do.”
― Guy P. Harrison, Think Before You Like: Social Media's Effect on the Brain and the Tools You Need to Navigate Your Newsfeed

“Racism is an avoidable culture clash masquerading as inescapable biological warfare.”
― Guy P. Harrison, At Least Know This: Essential Science to Enhance Your Life

“In attempting to know, we engage in grand and meaningful acts. We use our human brains as time machines, to see and learn from the distant past and to travel forward thousands, millions, and billions of years. This young, patchwork organ that evolved to help ancient primates find food and water, maintain group relationships, achieve sexual intercourse, and imagine the next best tool now carries us to the very ends of the universe and beyond.”
― Guy P. Harrison, At Least Know This: Essential Science to Enhance Your Life

“Museums are my cathedrals. Artifacts in glass cases are my sacred relics. I truly believe I have felt something close to religious fervor inside some of these buildings. I even feel that I have experienced the occasional transcendent moment inside a museum.”
― Guy P. Harrison, 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God

“Appreciate the magnificent brain you possess. Protect and nurture it. Strive to be a good skeptic and critical thinker so that fewer hours of your precious life will be squandered on dead-end beliefs. Always try to think like a scientist so that you might better know truth from fiction.”
― Guy P. Harrison, Think: Why You Should Question Everything

“Our problem is not a predetermined clash of irreconcilable genomes. Racism is generated and empowered by a flawed worldview that can be corrected with scientific and historical knowledge.”

-SKEPTIC MAGAZINE volume 25 number 3 2020”
― Guy P. Harrison

“Critical thinking is the indispensable skill for smart living in modern society, and skepticism is the essential posture for the fully awake twenty-first-century human being.”
― Guy P. Harrison, Good Thinking: What You Need to Know to be Smarter, Safer, Wealthier, and Wiser

“Every person is a collective, a vast and complex gathering of interdependent life. Any description of ‘human’ must acknowledge these intimate strangers. Our bond with microbes is such that they are not so much riders, parasites, and assistants as part human. And we, it’s becoming increasingly clear, may need to begin thinking of ourselves as part microbe.”
― Guy P. Harrison, At Least Know This: Essential Science to Enhance Your Life

“We have magnificent brains—and use them to believe nonsense and behave as fools. . . . We are enslaved to delusions and too often the servants of subconscious biases. . . . Our great challenge is to use our brains to overcome our brains.”
― Guy P. Harrison, At Least Know This: Essential Science to Enhance Your Life

“Mozart's music on a smartphone can't redeem or compensate for our lust for the ludicrous. Suckers for empty promises, false hopes, and pseudoscientific babble, we are our own worst enemies. Few people take the time to learn how brains process sensory input in misleading ways and how subconscious biases influence conscious thinking. The result is a global population teeming with easy targets for digitized nonsense and deception.”
― Guy P. Harrison, Think Before You Like: Social Media's Effect on the Brain and the Tools You Need to Navigate Your Newsfeed

“Evolution is the long blur, a constant and living flow of branching relationships. One thing is always connected to another and another. Having no regard for our love of labels and organization, life rolls on as a continual stream of organic matter. The important thing about the origin of the human brain is not pinpointing some specific time, event, or fossil to declare a beginning in order to satisfy our desire for order. What matters is that we understand the process from which it emerged and how deeply rooted the modern human brain is to its past.”
― Guy P. Harrison, Good Thinking: What You Need to Know to be Smarter, Safer, Wealthier, and Wiser

“We are not a collection of subspecies separated by biological canyons. Neither nature nor supernatural design imposed the different and often contradictory racial classification systems used around the world."

--"Race and Science", SKEPTIC MAGAZINE volume 25 number 3 2020”
― Guy P. Harrison

“When we transitioned to a species that relies so heavily on cognitive abilities, we became the most powerful and profoundly weird creatures of all time. Right now, more than 7.6 billion people carry inside their heads a three-pound blob of magic, an electrochemical storm of genius and creative madness that is unprecedented and unsurpassed in this planet’s 4.5 billion years of natural history. This is who humans became long ago, and this is who you are now. You are one more unique link in a long, living chain of fantastic inventiveness and brilliant imagination.”
― Guy P. Harrison, At Least Know This: Essential Science to Enhance Your Life

“The reality is that racial lynchings were a frequent and normal feature of life in the South. This unique method of murder was a devastating form of terrorism that imposed a constant threat to all black people. The white authority structure did not only tolerate or encourage these killings but used the fear of lynchings to control and oppress black people.”


--“Why White America Must Learn the History of Lynching”, Skeptical Inquirer (December 2020)”
― Guy P. Harrison

“Lynchings in the past have significantly shaped race relations in the present. A killing such as George Floyd’s lands on black people with a much heavier psychological weight because of lynching’s legacy. Too many white people fail to recognize this, and that needs to change. The hurt is too great, the simmering fear and anger too volatile, to bury forever. All Americans who would seek or demand a nation that is fairer to every citizen, less racist, and more peaceful have a responsibility to know this history in detail. … Confronting this ugliness would be difficult for everyone, of course, but it should be attempted. Ignorance and denial certainly have not worked, because this American wound still bleeds.”

-- “Why White America Must Learn the History of Lynching”, Skeptical Inquirer (December 2020)”
― Guy P. Harrison

“You are a human being with an immensely powerful brain. Don't underestimate its ability to separate you from much of the nonsense and danger out there. Your life is yours, live it wisely.”
― Guy P. Harrison, 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True

“The human brain is an organ out of time. It stands as evolved and best suited for daily life in the Pleistocene yet here it is, having to make do in a modern, high-tech, wired, and fast-changing world.”
― Guy P. Harrison, Think Before You Like: Social Media's Effect on the Brain and the Tools You Need to Navigate Your Newsfeed