Top 100 Humanist Quotes
#1. I hope for an America where neither "fundamentalist" nor "humanist" will be a dirty word, but a fair description of the different ways in which people of good will look at life and into their own souls.
Edward Kennedy
#2. To me, a feminist belongs in the same category as a humanist or an advocate for human rights. I don't see why someone who's a feminist should be thought of differently.
Suzanne Vega
#3. 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.
Meredith Brooks
#4. 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
#5. What we need to do is to humanize the scientist and simonize the humanist.
C.P. Snow
#6. The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle - secular, humanist, or religious - says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not?
Nathan Myhrvold
#7. 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
#8. Jimmie would forever be the Renaissance humanist, bearing his faith and optimism like a white light inside a chalice.
James Lee Burke
#10. The courts are merely a ruse, if you will, for humanist, atheistic educators to beat up on Christians.
Pat Robertson
#11. My family spans many world religions, ethnicities and nationalities. The truth is that I don't have one identity. I'm Scottish, British, European, Humanist, Atheist and in part at least, culturally Jewish.
Sara Sheridan
#12. 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
#13. I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.
Kurt Vonnegut
#14. I always thought that "humanist" was a good word long before I understood that anyone thought it was a bad word.
Gloria Steinem
#15. Yet humanitarianism is not a purely Christian movement any more than it is a purely humanist one.
Christopher Dawson
#16. Taxonomically, my family is Freethinker (including atheists, skeptics, agnostics); my genus is Humanist (including the religion-based), and my species is Secular.
John Rafferty
#17. 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.
John Ralston Saul
#18. Banning paper and plastic and making shoppers carry their groceries home in their mouths like dogs is just the thing to make a little tin humanist in the Obama West Wing think he's admiral of the Uzbek Navy.
P. J. O'Rourke
#19. Atheism comes into rather a bad press and I suppose I'd rather describe myself as a humanist ... I don't believe in God. I don't believe there is a God.
Stephen Fry
#20. The friends I have, and the people whom I admire, are people who have an understanding of the conditions under which we live, and have a humanist sense of the world. If that's lacking in my understanding of a person's negotiation of the world, I can't be close with that person.
Claudia Rankine
#21. The gospel shows a God far more holy than the legalist can bear, yet far more merciful than a humanist can conceive
Timothy Keller
#22. 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
#23. 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.
Whoopi Goldberg
#24. If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.
Joyce Carol Oates
#25. Any serious analysis of Marxism must begin with the controversy over whether he is a humanist champion of free will or a determinist. Because Marxian writings on the subject often are so contradictory, it is impossible to know for sure.
Kenneth Deutsch
#26. His heart filled his chest and ran to the end of his tail and the very tips of his considerable ears. It filled his head, squeezing out his brain. But Henri, the foundling, was a humanist, and while not particularly clever was the smartest creature Gamache knew. Everything he knew he knew by heart.
Louise Penny
#27. To be shockingly original with your first novel, you don't have to discover a new technique: Simply write about people as they are and not as the predominantly liberal and humanist literary establishment believes that they ought to be.
John Braine
#28. We have to claim anarchy and realize that systems have a life of their own that is anti-humanist. There is definitely an anti-humanist tendency in all systems.
Terence McKenna
#29. A humanist is anyone who rejects the attempt to describe or account for man wholly on the basis of physics, chemistry or animal behaviour.
Joseph Wood Krutch
#30. We now live in a secular humanist theocracy. I want to change that to a government with God at its head.
Gary DeMar
#32. Our humanist attitude should therefore throughout be to stress what we all have in common with each other and relegate quarrelsome religion to the private domain where it can do [less] harm.
Hermann Bondi
#33. The existence or non-existence of an undefined 'god' are quite pointless.
[From 'Why I am a Secular Humanist']
Herman Bondi
#34. I believe indeed that to rescue the humanist tradition of the last decades is of the utmost importance, and that Victor Serge is one of the outstanding personalities representing the socialist aspect of humanism.
Erich Fromm
#35. The true humanist maintains a just balance between sympathy and selection.
Irving Babbitt
#36. Discovery of one's self, of one's specific individual powers and potential capacities, learning how to develop them and use them as a socialized human being that cares about the needs of other individuals - would have to become the primary task of a new humanist education.
Mihailo Markovic
#37. As a Humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us A-bombs.
Kurt Vonnegut
#38. Confucius was a humanist and an agnostic.
Hu Shih
#39. 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.
Julianne Moore
#40. 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.
Corliss Lamont
#41. I never use the words HUMANIST or HUMANITARIAN, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature.
Gregory Maguire
#42. It does not matter to the killers if their victims are Christian or Muslim, Hindu or Humanist what matters is that they show that they can kill where they please.
Rowan Williams
#43. Only the free and personal man is a good citizen (realist), and even with the lack of particular (scholarly, artistic, etc)culture, a tasteful judge (humanist).
Max Stirner
#44. Whereas the Agricultural Revolution gave rise to theist religions, the Scientific Revolution gave birth to humanist religions, in which humans replaced gods.
Yuval Noah Harari
#45. It's one thing for my parents to behave all secular humanist and gamble with their own eternal souls; however it's altogether not all right that they also gambled with mine: They placed their bets with such self-rightous bravado, but I'm the one who lost.
Chuck Palahniuk
#46. Ramadan is, in its essence, a month of humanist spirituality.
Tariq Ramadan
#47. Three key humanist virtues are courage, cognition, and caring - not dependence, ignorance, or insensitivity to the needs of others.
Paul Kurtz
#48. I see that not everyone in the West has understood that the Soviet Union has disappeared from the political map of the world and that a new country has emerged with new humanist and ideological principles at the foundation of its existence.
Vladimir Putin
#49. As both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science.
Alan Lightman
#50. I am an existential libertarian humanist cocksucker. Now, what else do you want to know?
Remesh R.
#51. 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
#52. The removal of religion as history from our schoolbooks betrays the intellectual dishonesty of secular humanist educators and reveals their blind hostility to Christianity.
Tim LaHaye
#53. It is unfair to label me anti-Islam. I am an atheist and a secular humanist.
Taslima Nasrin
#55. Bertrand Russell started off as a mathematician and then degenerated into a philosopher and finally into a humanist; he went downhill rapidly!
Gregory Chaitin
#56. I think I'm more of an absurdist than a satirist. I think I'm more of a - humanist? I hate to say it!
Mike White
#57. The only difference between a Religious Humanist and a Secular Humanist is what they do on Sunday.
Fred Edwords
#58. To acknowledge the need of a new world-view would undermine the whole of their activity, and not many thinkers were willing to pay that price. Particularly not in a society where social exclusion meant rapid transportation to the proudest invention of the humanist sciences: the mental hospital.
Alexander Bard
#59. We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.
Mary McCarthy
#60. when the humanist revolution preached the stirring ideals of human liberty, human equality and human fraternity. Since 1789, despite numerous wars, revolutions and upheavals, humans have not managed to come up with any new value. All
Yuval Noah Harari
#61. He told me yesterday that weddings should be individual celebrations of a couple's relationship, ideally with just the bride and groom and a humanist minister. Everything else is merely social pressure to eat tiny cakes.
Hester Browne
#62. My father was a doctor. He was just a great guy, a gentle humanist, and an old-fashioned GP. He'd get up at three in the morning to see patients in different areas if they needed him.
Roselee Goldberg
#64. If you're going to do Shakespeare, do Shakespeare. There's a reason why he's been performed for hundreds of years. His words affect people on a very deep level. He's the true humanist. That all comes through his text, his words.
Christian Camargo
#65. 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
#66. At least five times, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist skeptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Christian Faith has to all appearance, gone to the dogs? But, in each of these five cases, it was the dog that died.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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.
Louis Kronenberger
#70. Democracy is the only system capable of reflecting the humanist premise of equilibrium or balance. The key to its secret is the involvement of the citizen.
John Ralston Saul
#71. I'm a humanist at heart: at the end of the day, we are all human beings.
Chet Faker
#72. 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.
Max Lerner
#73. There is no place in the Humanist worldview for either immortality or God in the valid meanings of those terms. Humanism contends that instead of the gods creating the cosmos, the cosmos, in the individualized form of human beings giving rein to their imagination, created the gods.
Corliss Lamont
#74. 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
#75. I took a page from [the playwright] Wendy Wasserstein's book. She said 'I'm not a feminist, I'm a humanist.'
Sarah Jessica Parker
#76. A true businessperson should also be a true humanist who understands that he stands to gain the most in a world that is stable for those he deals with, even if they do not fare as well as he does.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#77. To be a 'believer' does not make you superior to others; but to be a 'humanist' does make it so!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#78. I don't consider myself as a feminist but more a humanist.
Marjane Satrapi
#79. I'm very much a humanist. I'm very much pro-choice. I'm very much politically correct.
Sandra Bernhard
#80. And I guess, I guess it's a humanist film. It's not really a spiritual film and it's, you know, it's saying that we're all one tribe of humans and we're on this little rock, floating through the universe and (Amenabar) has these (transitional shots of) POVs where you see humans like ants.
Rachel Weisz
#81. Call it a case of observer bias on my part, but Humanist Paganism seems to be an emerging option for those who want to be part of the Pagan community, but who want to be a little more intellectual about their practices, and they really don't care about the 'woo' anymore.
Brendan Myers
#82. I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.
Kurt Vonnegut
#83. It is imperative for many branches of fundamentalist christianity to constantly feel conspired against ... so they cite humanist manifestos and theosophical societies and concoct these vast and dark organizations that exist nowhere but in the minds of those who conceive these theories.
J. Michael Straczynski
#84. 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.
#85. Women's fight for equal rights is essentially a humanist and peaceful struggle for true democracy, and a higher form of civilization.
Leyla Zana
#86. I am a humanist not a feminist. There's a big difference.
Lydia Lunch
#87. The real enemy is the secular humanist mindset which seeks to destroy everything that is good in this society.
Paul Weyrich
#88. The highest ethical duty is often to discard the outmoded ethics of the past. - Corliss Lamont, humanist philosopher
Dale McGowan
#89. I am a misanthropic humanist ... Do I like people? They're great, IN THEORY.
Bill Hicks
#90. I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.
Edward Abbey
#92. A wise and well-informed humanist has taken the time to look lovingly and wonderingly at the living world around him, and to study the ways in which scientists have tried to analyze the world ... THE BEST INTRODUCTION TO NATURAL HISTORY THAT HAS YET BEEN WRITTEN.
Marston Bates
#93. 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
#94. We have to replace beauty, which is a cultural concept, with goodness, which is a humanist concept.
Philippe Starck
#95. Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.
Kurt Vonnegut
#96. 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.
Cornel West
#97. 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.
Leon Wieseltier
#98. Education no longer has a humanist end or any value in itself; it has only one goal, to create technicians.
Jacques Ellul
#99. If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries' freedom will remain a distant dream.
Salman Rushdie
#100. This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.
J.V. Cunningham
