Paul Kurtz Quotes

#1. Skepticism is essential to the quest for knowledge, for it is in the seedbed of puzzlement that genuine inquiry takes root. Without skepticism, we may remain mired in unexamined belief systems that are accepted as sacrosanct yet have no factual basis in reality.

Paul Kurtz

#2. Parents have no right to impose their religion on their children ... A Fundamentalist Protestant parent has no right to expect the state to support his own narrow conception of education.

Paul Kurtz

#3. The theist can only find meaning by leaving this life for a transcendental world beyond the grave. The human world as he finds it is empty of 'ultimate purpose' and hence meaningless. Theism thus is an attempt to escape from the human condition; it is a pathetic deceit.

Paul Kurtz

#4. The skeptic has no illusions about life, nor a vain belief in the promise of immortality. Since this life here and now is all we can know, our most reasonable option is to live it fully.

Paul Kurtz

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

Paul Kurtz

#6. Most humans feel the transcendent temptation, the emotional drive to festoon the universe with large-scale meaning.

Paul Kurtz

#7. The government doesn't have to solve everyone's problem here.

Paul Kurtz

#8. Secular humanism is avowedly non-religious. It is a eupraxsophy (good practical wisdom), which draws its basic principles and ethical values from science, ethics, and philosophy.

Paul Kurtz

#9. The meaning of life is not to be discovered only after death in some hidden, mysterious realm; on the contrary, it can be found by eating the succulent fruit of the Tree of Life and by living in the here and now as fully and creatively as we can.

Paul Kurtz

#10. Life, when fully lived under a variety of cultural conditions, can be euphoric and optimistic; it can be a joy to experience and a wonder to behold.

Paul Kurtz

#11. 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

#12. No diety will save us; we must save ourselves.

Paul Kurtz

#13. Secular humanism proposes ... the complete implementation of the agenda of modernism ... what is necessary for it to occur is a ... New Enlightenment.

Paul Kurtz

#14. No one is infallible, and no one can claim a monopoly on truth or virtue. It would be contradictory for skepticism to seek to translate itself into a new faith.

Paul Kurtz

#15. We need to be skeptical of utopianists who offer unreliable totalistic visions of other worlds and strive to take us there. We need some ideals, but we also need to protect ourselves from the miscalculations and misadventures of visionaries.

Paul Kurtz

#16. Humanists hold that ethical values are relative to human experience and need not be derived from theological or metaphysical foundations.

Paul Kurtz

#17. We cannot remain silent when someone of the Pope's stature and credibility confuses religious principles for science

Paul Kurtz

#18. Only a fool of a scientist would dismiss the evidence and reports
in front of him and substitute his own beliefs in their place.

Paul Kurtz

#19. The tragedy of contemporary philosophy is that it has been castrated.

Paul Kurtz