史達爾名言
A humanist has four leading characteristics -- curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
- E. M. Forster
Those who belong to the orthodox faiths claim that the authority of their faith rests on revelation, and that revelation is given in the pages of books and accounts of miracles and wonders whose nature is supernatural. But those of us who have long discarded the belief in the supernatural still are in the presence of revelations which are the foundation of faith. We too have our revealed religion. We have looked upon the face of men and women that can be to us the symbols of that which is holy. We have heard words of sacred wisdom and truth spoken in the human voice. Out of the universe there have come to us these experience which, when accepted, give to us revelations, not of supernatural religion, but of a natural and inevitable faith in the spiritual powers that animate and dwell in the center of [a person's] being.
- John Lovejoy Elliott
I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishment after I'm dead.
- Kurt Vonnegut
In the end, anti-black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing -- anti-humanism.
- Shirley Chisholm
Humanism is the creed of those who believe that in the circle of enwrapping mystery, men's fates are in their own hands, a faith that for modern man is becoming the only possible faith.
- John Galsworthy
This is the greatest call of all
The call to a faith in people.
- Algernon Black
Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid.
- Marcus Aurelius
Self-respect knows no considerations.
- Mohandas K. Gandhi
I have known many good people who did not believe in God. But I have never known a human being who was good who did not believe in people. [language slightly modified]
- John Lovejoy Elliott
The human race may be compared to a writer. At the outset a writer has often only a vague general notion of the plan of his work, and of the thought he intends to elaborate. As he proceeds, penetrating his material, laboring to express himself fitly, he lays a firmer grasp on his thought; he finds himself. So the human race is writing its story, finding itself, discovering its own underlying purpose, revising, recasting a tale pathetic often, yet none the less sublime.
- Felix Adler
Humanism will affirm life rather than deny it, seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from it, and endeavor to establish the conditions of satisfactory life for all, not merely for the few.
- Humanist Manifesto, 1933
A humanistic religion, if it excludes our relation to nature, is pale and thin, as it is presumptuous, when it takes humanity as an object of worship.
- John Dewey
The human condition is that we are individuals in relationship, and there are tensions between individuality and relatedness. A humanist spirituality is not one of complete dependence, nor of complete independence -- neither condition can be defended as primary. Rather, a humanist spirituality is one of interdependence.
- Jone Johnson Lewis
Energy conveys to us the idea of motion and activity. Inside a living organism we see a source of power, which by some manner is released in terms of movement.... Life is energy... it is the creator or initiator of movement change, development. We are different from moment to moment because the life principle is at work with us.... The spirit of humanity, like the forces of nature, and like the physical life, is at bottom energy.... Spiritual life, therefore, is just as much a development out of what has gone before in the evolutionary process as physical life is; which means that the origin of spiritual life is from within.
- John Dietrich
Ethics cannot be based upon our obligations toward [people], but they are complete and natural only when we feel this Reverence for Life and the desire to have compassion for and to help all creatures insofar as it is in our power. I think that this ethic will become more and more recognized because of its great naturalness and because it is the foundation of a true humanism toward which we must strive if our culture is to become truly ethical.
- Albert Schweitzer
Religion is a shared quest for the values of the good life, the age-long, groping effect of [humanity] to create the social order in which human powers may flower in joyous fulfillment.
- A. Eustace Haydon
The purpose of democracy -- supplanting old belief in the necessary absoluteness of establish'd dynastic rulership, temporal, ecclesiastical, and scholastic, as furnishing the only security against chaos, crime, and ignorance -- is, through many transmigrations, and amid endless ridicules, arguments, and ostensible failures,
- Walt Whitman
A Humanist Code of Ethics:
Do no harm to the earth, she is your mother.
Being is more important than having.
Never promote yourself at another's expense.
Hold life sacred; treat it with reverence.
Allow each person the digity of his or her labor.
- Arthur Dobrin
Old: Hell is a place of eternal torment for the wicked.
New: Suffering is the natural result of breaking the laws of right living.
- Charles Francis Potter
In the faces of men and women I see God.
- Walt Whitman
This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labour in which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.
- Gloria Steinem
I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.
- Pearl S. Buck
Ethical Humanism is primarily an attitude about human beings, their worth, and the significance of their lives. It is concerned with the nature and quality of living; the character and creativity of our relationships. Because of this concern, humanism spontaneously flowers into a spiritual movement in its own right.
- Edward Ericson
The Humanist rarely loses the feeling of at-homeness in the universe. The Humanist is conscious of being an earth-child. There is a mystic glow in this sense of belonging. Memories of one's long ancestry still linger in muscle and nerve, in brain and germ cell. On moonlit nights, in the renewal of life in the springtime, before the glory of a sunset, in moments of swift insight, people feel the community of their own physical being with the body of mother earth. Rooted in millions of years of planetary history, the earthling has a secure feeling of being at home, and a consciousness of pride and dignity as a bearer of the heritage of the ages.
- A. Eustace Haydon
If abuses are destroyed, we must destroy them. If slaves are freed, we must free them. If new truths are discovered, we must discover them. If the naked are clothed; if the hungry are fed; if justice is done; if labor is rewarded; if superstition is driven from the mind; if the defenseless are protected and if the right finally triumphs, all must be the work of people. The grand victories of the future must be won by humanity, and by humanity alone. (language updated)
- Robert G. Ingersoll
The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—
- Emily Dickinson
Today the god hypothesis has ceased to be scientifically tenable ... and its abandonment often brings a deep sense of relief. Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct some thing to take its place.
The New Divinity
- Sir Julian Huxley
Humanism is optimistic regarding human nature and confident in human reason and science as the best means of reaching the goal of human fulfillment in this world. Humanists affirm that humans are a product of the same evolutionary process that produced all other living organisms and that all ideas, knowledge, values, and social systems are based upon human experience. Humanists conclude that creative ability and personal responsibility are strongest when the mind is free from supernatural belief and operates in an atmosphere of freedom and democracy. - published in Free Mind, American Humanist Association.
- Unknown
In my view, humanism relies on reason and compassion. Reason guides our attempt to understand the world about us. Both reason and compassion guide our efforts to apply that knowledge ethically, to understand other people, and have ethical relationships with other people.
2/95
- Molleen Matsumura
We believe that an ethical faith need not, and indeed cannot, be grounded in any one way. It is not that we are indifferent to questions about the ultimate nature and meaning of things. Far from it. It is that we believe the universe far too vast to be comprehended in its inner-most core or in its totality by any one person or by all people together. It is that we believe there is room for a great many differing interpretations of everything that is, and still may be. It is that we believe the justification of any religious faith, including an ethical faith, is not to be found in its grounding (important as this is for each of us individually), but in its consequences.
- Jerome Nathanson