Humanist Quotes - Page 6

• I would say I'm a humanist. I like that. I mean, I don't claim to know anything, but I'm curious about it all. I'm always fascinated when people really fervently believe, because I have such a hard time believing anything.

  Conor Oberst

  Believe, Mean, Hard Times

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Incidentally, I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the great science fiction writer and biochemist Dr. Isaac Asimov. John Updike, who is religious, says I talk more about God than any seminarian. Socialism is, in fact, a form of Christianity, people wishing to imitate Christ.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Religious, People, Wish

  Source: www.sharedhost.progressive.org

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• I'm very much a humanist. I'm very much pro-choice. I'm very much politically correct.

  Sandra Bernhard

  Choices, Abortion, Politically Correct

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• 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

  Faith, Christian, Dog

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• Publishing has gone very middlebrow. It's turned its back on legacy of modernism and gone into a humanist mode. When people go through art school they are exposed to the history of the avant-garde, and there's a general understanding that what you're doing as an artist is to a large extent, not just regurgitating that history, but engaging with it. There's this denial of that in the mainstream publishing world.

  Tommy McCarthy

  Art, School, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The real enemy is the secular humanist mindset which seeks to destroy everything that is good in this society.

  Paul Weyrich

  Real, Enemy, Mindset

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• Albert Camus, a great humanist and existentialist voice, pointed out that to commit to a just cause with no hope of success is absurd. But then, he also noted that not committing to a just cause is equally absurd. But only one choice offers the possibility for dignity. And dignity matters. Dignity matters.

  David Simon

  Voice, Choices, Matter

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• 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

  Christian, Religious, Mean

  Kurt Vonnegut (2001). “God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian”, p.9, Simon and Schuster

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• We now live in a secular humanist theocracy. I want to change that to a government with God at its head.

  Gary DeMar

  Government, Want, Theocracy

  "A Nation Under God" by John Sugg, www.motherjones.com. December 2005.

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• 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

  Race, Black, Belief

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• I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson - the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

  James A. Michener

  Plato, Thinking, People

  "The World Is My Home". Book by James A. Michener, 1991.

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• 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

  Dirty, America, People

  Edward M. Kennedy' Speech at Liberty Baptist College, www.washingtonpost.com. August 26, 2009.

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

  Paul Kurtz

  Ignorance, Caring, Keys

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• Humanism is an approach to life which encourages ethical and fulfilling living on the basis of reason and humanity, and rejects superstition and religion. The most immediate impact of living as a Humanist is that we believe this life is all there is - so what we do and the choices we make really count.

  Stephen Fry

  Believe, Impact, Choices

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• 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

  Spiritual, Mean, Facts

  "Margaret Atwood Ruins a Marriage, Talks Memes, Politics in Reddit AMA". Interview with Jia Tolentino, jezebel.com. December 30, 2014.

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• 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

  Believe, Personality, Lasts

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• Although I'm not Christian, I was raised Christian. I'm an atheist, with a slight Buddhist leaning. I've got a very strong sense of morality - it's just a different morality than the loud voices of the Christian morality.... I can't tell you how many films I've turned down because there was an absence of morality. And I don't mean that from any sort of Judeo-Christian-Muslim point of view. I'm not saying they're wrong and can't be made. But, fundamentally, I'm such a humanist that I can't bear to make films that make us feel humanity is more dark than it is light.

  Rachel Griffiths

  Christian, Strong, Buddhist

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• 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

  Philosophy, Long, West

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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• I always thought that "humanist" was a good word long before I understood that anyone thought it was a bad word.

  Gloria Steinem

  Long, Bad Word, Understood

  "The Humanist Interview with Gloria Steinem" by Jennifer Bardi, thehumanist.com. August 14, 2012.

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• 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

  Believe, Atheism, Bad Press

  "The Importance of Unbelief". Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. December 8, 2009.

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• We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.

  Mary McCarthy

  Humanity, Tubs, Bathroom

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• As one who knows many things, the humanist loves the world precisely because of its manifold nature and the opposing forces in itdo not frighten him. Nothing is further from him than the desire to resolve such conflictsand this is precisely the mark of the humanist spirit: not to evaluate contrasts as hostility but to seek human unity, that superior unity, for all that appears irreconcilable.

  Stefan Zweig

  Tolerance, Unity, Desire

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• 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

  Christian, Religious, Intellectual

  Tim LaHaye (1996). “Faith of Our Founding Fathers: A Comprehensive Study of America's Christian Foundations”, p.14, New Leaf Publishing Group

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• Today the separation of church and state in America is used to silence the church. When Christians speak out on issues, the hue and cry from the humanist state and media is that Christians, an all religions, are prohibited from speaking since there is a separation of church and state.

  Francis Schaeffer

  Christian, Religious, Media

  Francis August Schaeffer (1982). “The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian view of the west”

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• Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Commitment, America, Long

  "The Myth Makers: European and Latin American Writers" by V. S. Pritchett, (p. 102), 1979.

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