Humanist Quotes

• The beginning of wisdom is the awareness that there is insufficient evidence that a god or gods have created us and the recognition that we are responsible in part for our own destiny. Human beings can achieve this good life, but it is by the cultivation of the virtues of intelligence and courage, not faith and obedience, that we will most likely be able to do so.

  Paul Kurtz

  Good Life, Destiny, Atheism

  Paul Kurtz (1986). “The Transcendental Temptation: A Critique of Religion and the Paranormal”

  35 Copy quote

  Show source

• Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Inspirational, Motivational, Atheist

  74 Copy quote

• If a humanist or an atheist or an agnostic says, "We'll bake you a pie," we can go right into the kitchen and bake it, and you can eat it an hour later. We don't promise you a pie in the sky by and by. It's charlatanry to promise people something that no one can be sure will ever be delivered. But it's even worse to offer people a reward, like children, for being good, and to threaten them with punishment if they're not.

  Madalyn Murray O'Hair

  Atheist, Children, Pie

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Justice, Forever, Brotherhood

  69 Copy quote

• My heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain... to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Wise, Gratitude, Hero

  "The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll: Lectures".

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Keys, House, Secret

  John Ralston Saul (2012). “The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense”, p.94, Simon and Schuster

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• On religion in particular, the time appears to me to have come, when it is a duty of all who, being qualified in point of knowledge, have, on mature consideration, satisfied themselves that the current opinions are not only false, but hurtful, to make their dissent known.

  John Stuart Mill

  Hurtful, Opinion, Mature

  John Stuart Mill (2015). “Autobiography John Stuart Mill: Top Biography”, p.20, 谷月社

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Motivational, Courage, Atheist

  Bertrand Russell (1957). “Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects”, p.23, Simon and Schuster

  52 Copy quote

  Show source

• Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

  Seneca the Younger

  Wise, Religious, Atheist

  137 Copy quote

• Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Sports, Fighting, History

  7 Copy quote

• Since Humanism as a functioning credo is so closely bound up with the methods of reason and science, plainly free speech and democracy are its very lifeblood. For reason and scientific method can flourish only in an atmosphere of civil liberties.

  Corliss Lamont

  Atmosphere, Democracy, Liberty

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Religious, Art, Philosophy

  17 Copy quote

• What can you or I do? Alone, almost nothing. Yet one person - you alone - can make the difference. . . . The failure of just one person to join, to participate, to do whatever he or she can - your failure or my failure - may mean that there is just one too few to win the fight for sanity, and so leave the world on the road to destruction. Each of us, all of us, must do what we can.

  Archibald Cox

  Mean, Fighting, Winning

  36 Copy quote

• The values of science and the values of democracy are concordant, in many cases indistinguishable. Science and democracy began - in their civilized incarnations - in the same time and place, Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. . . . Science thrives on, indeed requires, the free exchange of ideas; its values are antithetical to secrecy. Science holds to no special vantage points or privileged positions. Both science and democracy encourage unconventional opinions and vigorous debate. Both demand adequate reason, coherent argument, rigorous standards of evidence and honesty.

  Carl Sagan

  Honesty, Ideas, Democracy

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Wise, War, People

  George Grosz (1982). “The autobiography of George Grosz: a small yes and a big no”

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• The present age has seen a great slump in humanist values.

  Christopher Dawson

  Age, Slumps, Literature

  7 Copy quote

• Why continue? Because we must. Because we have the call. Because it is nobler to fight for rationality without winning than to give up in the face of continued defeats. Because whatever true progress humanity makes is through the rationality of the occasional individual and because any one individual we may win for the cause may do more for humanity than a hundred thousand who hug their superstitions to their breast.

  Isaac Asimov

  Giving Up, Fighting, Winning

  36 Copy quote

• I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it.

  Isaac Asimov

  Atheist, Long, Atheism

  Free Inquiry Journal, Spring 1982.

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• This Humanist whom no beliefs constrained Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.

  J. V. Cunningham

  Political, Belief, Broads

  5 Copy quote

• Nature abhors a vacuum.

  Francois Rabelais

  Nature, Hate, Science

  "Gargantua", Chapter V, as quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations, p. 544-48, 1922.

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  Life, Positive, Birthday

  180 Copy quote

• I believe in art that is connected to real human feeling, that extends itself beyond the limits of the art world to embrace all people who are striving for alternatives in an increasingly dehumanized world. I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism.

  Judy Chicago

  Art, Real, Believe

  57 Copy quote

• Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.

  Desiderius Erasmus

  Inspirational, Uplifting, Light Life

  108 Copy quote

• The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.

  E. M. Forster

  Race, Curiosity, Mind

  E.M. Forster (1951). “Two Cheers for Democracy”

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Mind, Tasks, Boards

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.4285, Library of Alexandria

  34 Copy quote

  Show source