62 Top Humanism Quotes And Sayings
Humanism is a rationalist outlook or system of thought attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters.
1. Humanism was not invented by man, but by a snake who suggested that the quest for autonomy might be a good idea.
R. C. Sproul
2. A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear and punishment and hope of reward after death.
Albert Einstein
3. To become truly human,one has to try an release oneself from the shackles of race,religion and nationality.The quantum of humanism one acquires is inevitably filtered when one limits oneself.
Ashoka Jahnavi Prasad
4. The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment
Johannes Kepler
5. The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.
Mahatma Gandhi
6. Humanism and Divinity are as complementary to one another in the order of culture, as are Nature and Grace in the order of being.
Christopher Dawson
7. I AM A HUMANIST If you are hungry, I will offer food. If you are thirsty, I will offer water. If you are cold, I will offer warmth. If you are in need, ask and I will give. If you are in trouble, ask and I will help. I DO NOT DO THESE THINGS IN HOPES OF BEING REWARDED, OR OUT OF FEAR OF BEING PUNISHED. I DO THESE THINGS BECAUSE I KNOW THEM TO BE RIGHT. I SET MY OWN STANDARDS AND I ALONE ENFORCE THEM.
Anonymous
8. There is some kind of a sweet innocence in being human- in not having to be just happy or just sad- in the nature of being able to be both broken and whole, at the same time
C. Joybell C
9. I remain a humanist. We are a very curious race.
Michael Tippett
10. Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards and punishment in an afterlife.
Kurt Vonnegut
11. That which is called humanism, but what would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of our life.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
12. The more I read and the more I listen, the more apparent it is that our society suffers from an alarming degree of public ignorance… We have to ensure that our citizens are well informed and prepared to face tough challenges
O’Connor
13. The experience of humanism is that ‘nothing human is alien to me’; that I carry within myself all of humanity; that nothing which exists in any human being does not exist in myself. I am the criminal and the saint. I am the child and the adult. I am the man who lived 100000 years ago and the man who will live 100000 years from now.
Erich Fromm
14. Secular humanists suspect there is something more gloriously human about resisting the religious impulse; about accepting the cold truth, even if that truth is only that the universe is as indifferent to us as we are to it.
Tom Flynn
15. A humanist is someone who does the right thing even though she knows that no one is watching.
Dick McMahan
16. The Humanist has a feeling of perfect at-homeness in the universe. He is conscious of himself as an Earth child. There is a mystic glow in this sense of belonging. Memories of his long ancestry still ring in muscle and nerve, in brain and germ cell. Rooted in millions of years of planetary history, he has a secure feeling of being at home, and a consciousness of pride and dignity as a bearer of the heritage of the ages and a growing creative center of cosmic life
Eustare Haydon
17. Humanism is the only – I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.
Edward W. Said
18. Confucius was a humanist and an agnostic.
Hu Shih
19. Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.
Robert G. Ingersoll
20. Education is thus a most power ally of humanism, and every public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday school, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teachings?
Charles Francis Potter
21. Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.
Angelina Jolie
22. Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies—my only talent—smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire
Walker Percy
23. The essence of Christianity, as I see it, is love. The essence of Humanism (and I’m also a Humanist) is love. At that level, we’re not far apart.
Mark Thomas
24. Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
Bertrand Russell
25. A picture can express a universal humanism, or simply reveal a delicate and poignant truth by exposing a slice of life that might otherwise pass unnoticed.
Steve McCurry
26. We humanists celebrate humanity. We want humanity to survive. We recognize that if humanity does survive it will be only by its own efforts. Never can we sit back and wait for miracles to save us. Miracles don’t happen. Sweat happens. Effort happens. Thought happens. And it is up to us humanists to help to expend our sweat, our effort, and our thought. Then there will be hope for the world.
Isaac Asimov
27. I think the trouble with being a critical thinker or an atheist or a humanist is that you’re right. And it’s quite hard being right in the face of people who are wrong without sounding like a fuckwit. People go, ‘Do you think the vast majority of the world is wrong?’ Well, yes. I don’t know how to say that nicely, but, yes.
Tim Minchin
28. We in the United States, above all, must remember that lesson, for we were founded as a nation of openness to people of all beliefs. And so we must remain. Our very unity has been strengthened by our pluralism. We establish no religion in this country, we command no worship, we mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are, and must remain, separate. All are free to believe or not believe, all are free to practice a faith or not, and those who believe are free, and should be free, to speak of and act on their belief.
RONALD WILSON REAGAN
29. Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.
Christopher Hitchens
30. I can stand at the beach’s edge with the most devout Christian, Jew, Buddhist, go on down the line, and weep with the beauty of this universe and be moved by all of humanity — all the billions of people who have lived before us, who have loved and hurt
Diana Nyad
31. All the world’s religions, with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance and forgiveness, can and do promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether.
Dalai LAma
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32. Deficit reduction is not an end in itself. It is the means to an end. Canadians must now decide what kind of country they want to build with the hard-won dividend.
Jean Chretien
33. Democrats Do have ANY thoughts on Obama's transition from a progressive academic Humanist, to a regressive Corporatist warlord?
John Cusack
34. We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
Gene Roddenberry
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35. Our society is the product of several great religious and philosophical traditions. The ideas of the Greeks and Romans, Christianity, Judaism, humanism and the Enlightenment have made us who we are.
Jan Peter Balkenende
36. It is what you do from now on that will either move our civilization forward a few tiny steps, or else… begin to march us steadily backward.
Patrick Stewart
37. Humanism involves far more than the negation of supernaturalism. It requires an affirmative philosophy . . . translated into a life devoted to one’s own improvement and the service of all mankind.
Corliss Lamont
38. I had grown up in a humanist atmosphere, and war to me was never anything but horror, mutilation and senseless destruction, and I knew that many great and wise people felt the same way about it.
George Grosz
39. Five enemies of peace inhabit with us – avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.
Petrarch
40. Secular humanism is a nonreligious worldview rooted in science, philosophical naturalism (rather than supernaturalism), and humanist ethics. Instead of relying on faith, doctrine, or mysticism, secular humanists use reason, compassion, and human experience to find solutions to human problems. Secular humanists promote values including integrity, benevolence, fairness, and responsibility, and believe that with reason, good will, and the free exchange of ideas, we can build a better world for ourselves and for future generations.
Anonymous
41. For the humanists, whatever authority Scripture might possess derived from the original texts in their original languages, rather than from the Vulgate, which was increasingly recognized as unreliable and inaccurate. In that the catholic church continued to insist that the Vulgate was a doctrinally normative translation, a tension inevitably developed between humanist biblical scholarship and catholic theology…Through immediate access to the original text in the original language, the theologian could wrestle directly with the ‘Word of God,’ unhindered by ‘filters’ of glosses and commentaries that placed the views of previous interpreters between the exegete and the text. For the Reformers, ‘sacred philology’ provided the key by means of which the theologian could break free from the confines of medieval exegesis and return ad fontes to the title deeds of the Christian faith rather than their medieval expressions, to forge once more the authentic theology of the early church
Alister E. McGrath
42. Humanism an exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society.
John Ralston Saul
43. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
Susan B. Anthony
44. An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
45. The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this for me.
Albert Einstein
46. The intellectual thing I should want to say to them is this: When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed, but look only and solely at what are the facts. That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say.
Bertrand Russell
47. I love how when people watch a David Attenborough or Discovery Planet type thing, you know where you see the absolute phenomenal majesty and complexity and bewildering beauty of nature and you stare at it and then and somebody next to you goes, “And how can you say there is no God? Look at that
Stephen Fry
48. I don’t believe in heaven and hell. I don’t know if I believe in God. All I know is that as an individual, I won’t allow this life – the only thing I know to exist – to be wasted.
George Clooney
49. Humanism rejects religion. It attributes nothing to the so-called supernatural. In this there is an awakened liberty that releases us from the shackles and servitude mentality of old superstitions so that we may realize our full potential
Anonymous
50. Reason, decency, tolerance, empathy and hope are human traits that we should aspire to, not because we seek reward of eternal life or because we fear the punishment of a supernatural being, but because they define our humanity. Only in recent years have I come to appreciate that all those qualities I have tried to espouse are precisely what defines Humanism.
Jim Al-Khalili
51. I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead.
Kurt Vonnegut
52. We want to stand at the intersection of computers and humanism.
Steve Jobs
53. A humanist has four leading characteristics — curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
E. M. Forster
54. 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.
Stephen Fry
55. People ask me, Is yours an atheistic principle1. Boldly I reply 'No. Atheism is my tool. Humanism is my principle.
Kamal Haasan
56. The Humanist view of life is progressive and optimistic, in awe of human potential, living without fear of judgement and death, finding enough purpose and meaning in life, love and leaving a good legacy
Polly Toynbee
57. Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.
Simone Weil
58. I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven. No, I would say sorry, I mean I would much rather go to the other place,” Archbishop Tutu said at the launch of the Free and Equal campaign in Cape Town. “I would not worship a God who is homophobic and that is how deeply I feel about this.
Desmond Tutu
59. When Christians are subject to insults to their faith, and that certainly happens, we expect them not to resort to violence. When Hindus or Buddhists are subjected to insults to their faiths, and that also certainly happens, we expect them not to resort to violence,” said Clinton. “The same goes for all faiths, including Islam
Hillary Clinton
60. If there is no god — and there isn't — then we made up morality. And I'm very impressed.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
61. Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism and other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.
Anonymous
62. 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.
Linus Pauling