Humanist Quotes

Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together.

The gospel shows a God far more holy than the legalist can bear, yet far more merciful than a humanist can conceive

Man must not check his reason by tradition, but, contrariwise, must check tradition by reason.

I would want to conceive of philosophy as grounded in the very long humanist tradition that is the best of the West, which is open to the East and North and South.

The theory that everyone acts from self-interest, direct or indirect, is psychologically unsound. . . . Throughout history . . . there have been millions of men and women with some sort of Humanist philosophy who have consciously given up their lives for a social ideal.

At one point, 'feminist' became a pejorative term. How did that happen? If you're a feminist, you're basically saying you're a humanist.

I am a humanist not a feminist. Theres a big difference.

I don't consider myself as a feminist but more a humanist.

I would love to say that I'm a humanist, but I think the word "feminist" still needs to exist to acknowledge that there's still a problem. It's a statement; we're not equal yet. There's still a fight to be fought.

No, not a feminist. I'm a humanist. I'm neither one side nor the other.

I'm not a feminist, I'm a humanist.

Do you say that religion is still needed? Then I answer that Work, Study, Health and Love constitute religion. . . . Most formal religions have pronounced the love of man for woman and woman for man an evil thing. . . . They have said that sickness was sent from God. . . . Now we deny it all, and again proclaim that these will bring you all the good there is: Health, Work, Study - Love!

Science itself is a humanist in the sense that it doesn't discriminate between human beings, but it is also morally neutral. It is no better or worse than the ethos with and for which it is used.

Humanism is an approach to life which encourages ethical and fulfilling living on the basis of reason and humanity, and rejects superstition and religion. The most immediate impact of living as a Humanist is that we believe this life is all there is - so what we do and the choices we make really count.

Alfred Nobel regretted that his invention, dynamite, was converted to degrading use, hence his creation of the Nobel Prize, as the humanist counter to the destructive power of his genius.

I would say I'm a humanist. I like that. I mean, I don't claim to know anything, but I'm curious about it all. I'm always fascinated when people really fervently believe, because I have such a hard time believing anything.

The beginning of wisdom is the awareness that there is insufficient evidence that a god or gods have created us and the recognition that we are responsible in part for our own destiny. Human beings can achieve this good life, but it is by the cultivation of the virtues of intelligence and courage, not faith and obedience, that we will most likely be able to do so.

Happiness is not synonymous with pleasure. It is, instead, a deeper emotion that originates from within. . . . Happiness results from a sense of mental and moral contentment with who we are, what we value, and how we invest our time and resources for purposes beyond ourselves.

Each of us, even the lowliest and most insignificant among us, was uprooted from his innermost existence by the almost constant volcanic upheavals visited upon our European soil and, as one of countless human beings, I can't claim any special place for myself except that, as an Austrian, a Jew, writer, humanist and pacifist, I have always been precisely in those places where the effects of the thrusts were most violent.

On religion in particular, the time appears to me to have come, when it is a duty of all who, being qualified in point of knowledge, have, on mature consideration, satisfied themselves that the current opinions are not only false, but hurtful, to make their dissent known.

When people say to me, 'Why are you so good at writing at women?' I say, 'Why isn't everybody?' Obviously there are differences between men and women - that's what makes it all fun. But we're all people. There's a lot of good writers who are very humanist, but still manage to kind of skip fifty-five per cent of the race. And I just don't get that. Not to be able to write an entire gender? To me, the question isn't how do you do it? It's how can you possibly avoid doing it?

In the humanist ideal, the mainstream is where interesting debate, the generating of new ideas and creativity take place. In rational society this mainstream is considered uncontrollable and is therefore made marginal. The centre ground is occupied instead by structures and courtiers.

With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order.

Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.

This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.

Why continue? Because we must. Because we have the call. Because it is nobler to fight for rationality without winning than to give up in the face of continued defeats. Because whatever true progress humanity makes is through the rationality of the occasional individual and because any one individual we may win for the cause may do more for humanity than a hundred thousand who hug their superstitions to their breast.

Christian morality, laws rooted in the secular humanist belief that all consensual sexual acts are morally equal. That belief is anti-biblical and amoral; to codify it into law is to codify a lie.

Only rarely do we see beyond the needs of humanity, and he linked this blindness to our Christian and humanist infrastructure. It arose 2,000 years ago and was then benign, and we were no significant threat to Gaia. Now that we are over six billion hungry and greedy individuals, all aspiring to a first-world lifestyle, our urban way of life encroaches upon the domain of the living Earth.

They who say that we should love our fellow-citizens but not foreigners, destroy the universal brotherhood of mankind, with which benevolence and justice would perish forever.

I'm a humanist. I'm an observer. I have a very scientific mind. I believe metaphysics and science absolutely blended are more the truth for me. It doesn't work just believing in what somebody says.

We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.

From the failure of the humanist tradition to participate fully or to act decisively, civilizations may perhaps crumble or perish at the hands of barbarians. But unless the humanist tradition itself in some form survives, there can really be no civilization at all.

The most glorious vision of the intellectual life is still that which is loosely called humanist: the idea of a mind committed yet dispassionate, ready to stand alone, curious, eager, skeptical. The banner of critical independence, ragged and torn though it may be, is still the best we have.

It's fantastic to believe, because they get so many benefits. I get mad at the atheist community when they put down believers because they put down religion so much. Now I am an atheist, but I don't like to describe myself with that term. I prefer secular humanist. But I do see first hand how beneficial religion is, for example if you are a refugee getting in a boat to take you across the Mediterranean, a belief in God is an advantage. I completely understand that comfort.

It's no understatement that the church has done a poor job in teaching our young people that reason and faith are not opposites, and that atheists are far from being on the side of reason. You can find on our website a chart which I use to demonstrate the various worldviews work out, and which one, Christianity, is rational. Many kids, however, who grow up huddled in a Christian environment find themselves in the university setting completely unequipped to defend the rationality of the Christian faith against the secular humanist worldview so prevalent on college campuses.

Three key humanist virtues are courage, cognition, and caring - not dependence, ignorance, or insensitivity to the needs of others.

Publishing has gone very middlebrow. It's turned its back on legacy of modernism and gone into a humanist mode. When people go through art school they are exposed to the history of the avant-garde, and there's a general understanding that what you're doing as an artist is to a large extent, not just regurgitating that history, but engaging with it. There's this denial of that in the mainstream publishing world.

Humanism is a philosophy of joyous service for the greater good of all humanity, of application of new ideas of scientific progress for the benefit of all.

I think . . . that philosophy has the duty of pointing out the falsity of outworn religious ideas, however estimable they may be as a form of art. We cannot act as if all religion were poetry while the greater part of it still functions in its ancient guise of illicit science and backward morals. . . .

Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. . . . We might as well require a man to wear the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain forever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it.

Confucius was a humanist and an agnostic.

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

The values of science and the values of democracy are concordant, in many cases indistinguishable. Science and democracy began - in their civilized incarnations - in the same time and place, Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. . . . Science thrives on, indeed requires, the free exchange of ideas; its values are antithetical to secrecy. Science holds to no special vantage points or privileged positions. Both science and democracy encourage unconventional opinions and vigorous debate. Both demand adequate reason, coherent argument, rigorous standards of evidence and honesty.

Humanism believes that the individual attains the good life by harmoniously combining personal satisfactions and continuous self-development with significant work and other activities that contribute to the welfare of the community.

A humanist is anyone who rejects the attempt to describe or account for man wholly on the basis of physics, chemistry or animal behaviour.

Although I'm not Christian, I was raised Christian. I'm an atheist, with a slight Buddhist leaning. I've got a very strong sense of morality - it's just a different morality than the loud voices of the Christian morality.... I can't tell you how many films I've turned down because there was an absence of morality. And I don't mean that from any sort of Judeo-Christian-Muslim point of view. I'm not saying they're wrong and can't be made. But, fundamentally, I'm such a humanist that I can't bear to make films that make us feel humanity is more dark than it is light.

I'm very much a humanist. I'm very much pro-choice. I'm very much politically correct.