103 Humanist Quotes
Following is our list of humanist quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about i am a humanist.
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Famous Humanist Quotes
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
Humanists hold that ethical values are relative to human experience and need not be derived from theological or metaphysical foundations. — Paul Kurtz
Humanism is the philosophy that you should be a good guest at the dinner table of life. — A.C. Grayling
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
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
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 Said
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
The most wonderful study of mankind is man. Relieving human suffering and diffusing universal knowledge is humanitarian. — Daniel D. Palmer
Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead. — Kurt Vonnegut
From my point of view, there is a tremendous amount to be said for secular humanism. — Vidal Sassoon
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
Almost all theological thought is anthropocentric and I just cannot buy into the anthropocentric ideology. Basically we're a bunch of conceited apes. — Sayings
At present, too much theological thinking is very human-centered. — John Polkinghorne
A person is truly a human if he or she learns, and teaches, and inspires others. It is difficult to regard as truly human someone who is ignorant and has no desire to learn. — Fethullah Gulen
The greatness of humanity is not in being human, but in being humane. — Mahatma Gandhi
Short Humanist Quotes
- We have to replace beauty, which is a cultural concept, with goodness, which is a humanist concept. — Philippe Starck
- Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities. — Alfred L. Kroeber
- Ramadan is, in its essence, a month of humanist spirituality. — Tariq Ramadan
- It is unfair to label me anti-Islam. I am an atheist and a secular humanist. — Taslima Nasrin
- Power is the flower of organization. — A. Philip Randolph
- What we need to do is to humanize the scientist and simonize the humanist. — C.P. Snow
- I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. — Isaac Asimov
- Confucius was a humanist and an agnostic. — Hu Shih
- Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. — Thomas Jefferson
- The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. — Kurt Vonnegut
Secular Humanist Quotes
How can there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age worshipers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy money changers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers, and homosexuals are on top? — Pat Robertson
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
We now live in a secular humanist theocracy. I want to change that to a government with God at its head. — Gary DeMar
The term that best describes me now is 'secular humanist.' — Charles M. Schulz
My ancestors were Freethinkers - and that's what I am, except we're called secular humanists now. — Kurt Vonnegut
The secular humanist, although he would never dream of committing the social faux pas of calling a black man a negro, feels perfectly free to castigate Christians and their leaders in any way he likes. — Frank Schaeffer
The only difference between a Religious Humanist and a Secular Humanist is what they do on Sunday. — Fred Edwords
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. — Pat Buchanan
Secular humanists can sit around and talk about their love of humanity, but it doesn't stack up against a two-millennium-old funeral high mass. — E. O. Wilson
It is of interest to note that most secular humanists continue to belabor the horrors of the Inquisition in order to establish the moral depravity of Christianity. — Guenter Lewy
I Am A Humanist Quotes
In nearly every religion I am aware of, there is a variation of the golden rule. And even for the non-religious, it is a tenet of people who believe in humanistic principles. — Hillary Clinton
I am an anarchist, and according to anarchist principles nation states become obstacles to a true humanistic globalization. — Howard Zinn
I'm not sure I really am a Humanist. I describe myself as a rigorous agnostic, which means that you cannot declare as a matter of material truth something that is in fact a matter of spiritual belief. — Margaret Atwood
I am a humanist not a feminist. There's a big difference. — Lydia Lunch
This is always a pain because it's injustice too and so my response to it, I tell you what I am more surprised or horrified at Jews who forget to be humanists than I am at anybody else. — Janet Suzman
I am Left Wing. I am a Humanist. — Gaspar Noe
What I am is a humanist before anything - before I'm a Jew, before I'm black, before I'm a woman. And my beliefs are for the human race - they don't exclude anyone. — Sayings
I am a misanthropic humanist... Do I like people? They're great, IN THEORY. — Bill Hicks
What I say should always be prefaced with this: I'm not really politically articulate. I just try to be like Thomas Paine: what is common sense? So when I say these things to you, I am speaking from a humanist point of view. I just look around and see what's wrong. — Patti Smith
Renaissance Humanism Quotes
What I'm suggesting to you is that this could be a renaissance. We may be on the cusp of a future which could provide a tremendous leap forward for humanity. — Jeremy Rifkin
There is a fascination with violence and power in all modernism, and I sort of saw classic modernism as being more similar to Wyndham Lewis than to the Renaissance. It's not about flow and the presence of humanism and all those things. — John Currin
Good design is a Renaissance attitude that combines tech, cognitive science, human need and beauty to produce something. — Paola Antonelli
We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective. — Irving Babbitt
The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance. — Aberjhani
Just as a human soul that faces great difficulties also faces great opportunities for spiritual growth, so a human society that faces destruction also faces the opportunity to enter a period of renaissance. I think that, barring an accident, the wish to survive will keep us from a nuclear war. — Peace Pilgrim
Every era of renaissance has come out of new freedoms for peoples. The coming renaissance will be greater than any in human history, for this time all the peoples of the earth will share in it. — Pearl S. Buck
Atheist Humanist Quotes
Now I have to say I'm a complete atheist, I have no religious views myself and no spiritual views, except very watered down humanistic spiritual views, and consciousness is just a fact of life, it's a natural fact of life. — David Chalmers
A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. — Bertrand Russell
Christian families are under attack in America! The Communists, Masons, Atheists, Humanists, Evolutionists, and other Godless sickos want to destroy the family. Parents beware; the government wants your child! — Lester Roloff
I consider myself spiritual and I'm married to a man who is both an atheist and a humanist, and my kids have been raised with the traditions of different religions, but they do not go to church or temple. My feeling is that everyone should be able to believe what they want or need to believe. — Jodi Picoult
I think this word 'disbelieve' would be the best of all possible worlds if everybody were an atheist or an agnostic or a humanist - his or her own particular brand - but as for compelling people to this, absolutely not. — Madalyn Murray O'Hair
Atheistic secular humanists should be removed from office and Christians should be elected...Government and true Christianity are inseparable. — Robert Simonds
The courts are merely a ruse, if you will, for humanist, atheistic educators to beat up on Christians. — Pat Robertson
People Writing About Humanist
More Humanist Quotes
We must realize that the Reformation world view leads in the direction of government freedom. But the humanist world view with inevitable certainty leads in the direction of statism. This is so because humanists, having no god, must put something at the center, and it is inevitably society, government, or the state. — Francis Schaeffer
Since Stonehenge, architects have always been at the cutting edge of technology. And you cant separate technology from the humanistic and spiritual content of a building. — Norman Foster
I have no notions of a perfect society, I don’t know what that means. I know we can do much better than what we’ve got, I’m no utopian, I’m not a humanist that would like to see everybody living in warmth and harmony: I know that if we don’t live that way, we’ll kill each other and destroy the Earth. — Jacque Fresco
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. — Marcus Tullius Cicero
Nursing encompasses an art, a humanistic orientation, a feeling for the value of the individual, and an intuitive sense of ethics, and of the appropriateness of action taken. — Myrtle Aydelotte
It is, indeed, perhaps the greatest prospect of humanistic studies to contribute through an increasing knowledge of the history of cultural development to that gradual removal of prejudices which is the common aim of all science. — Niels Bohr
Women's fight for equal rights is essentially a humanist and peaceful struggle for true democracy, and a higher form of civilization. — Leyla Zana
Much of human progress has been in defiance of religion or of the apparent natural order. The defiance of religious and secular authority has led to democracy, human rights, and the protection of the environment. Humanists make no apologies for this. Humanists twist no biblical doctrine to justify such actions. — Fred Edwords
The state is a bankrupt institution. The only alternative to this bankrupt 'humanistic' system is a God-centered government. — R.J. Rushdoony
About belief or lack of belief in an afterlife: Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort. I am a humanist, which mean, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead. — Kurt Vonnegut
To destroy guide-boards that point in the wrong direction . . . to drive the fiend of fear from the mind . . . is the task of the Freethinker. — Robert Green Ingersoll
I think design, to a degree, is more generous and more humanistic than art, though great art can move us more. — Paula Scher
The making of adaptable, curious, open, questioning people has nothing to do with vocational training and everything to do with humanistic and scientific studies. — Neil Postman
I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural artifacts worthy of their attention and respect. — Bruno Latour
Internationalism on the other hand admits that spiritual achievements have their roots deep in national life; from this national consciousness art and literature derive their character and strength and on it even many of the humanistic sciences are firmly based. — Christian Lous Lange
My politics are just inclined to be empathetic and humanistic. I grew up with so many different kinds of people with different politics, different religion, no religion, no politics, education, no education, and I was infatuated with all of them. — Lily Tomlin
Education no longer has a humanist end or any value in itself; it has only one goal, to create technicians. — Jacques Ellul
However, we all share the firm belief in the triumph of humanist and progressive values that mankind has achieved during its long history of struggle and creativeness. — Tran Duc Luong
Many humanists have argued that happiness involves a combination of hedonism and creative moral development; that an exuberant life fuses excellence and enjoyment, meaning and enrichment, emotion and cognition. — Paul Kurtz
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
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
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. . . . — Corliss Lamont
I would be the last to condemn the thousands of sincere and dedicated people outside the churches who have labored unselfishly through various humanitarian movements to cure the world of social evils, for I would rather a man be a committed humanist than an uncommitted Christian. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
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. — Corliss Lamont
A person who has sympathy for mankind in the lump, faith in its future progress, and desire to serve the great cause of this progress, should be called not a humanist, but a humanitarian, and his creed may be designated as humanitarianism. — Irving Babbitt
The Fundamentalist Religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones. — Martin Seligman
Jewish intellectuals contributed a great deal to insure that Europe became a continent of humanism, and it is with these humanist ideals that Europe must now intervene in the Middle East conflict. — Daniel Barenboim
If you read my books, especially the Star Trek books and the Quest for Tomorrow books, you'll see in them the core theme of the basic humanistic questions that Star Trek asked. — William Shatner
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