Quotes About Humanists

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.

There was a strain of ruthlessness and cruelty in early modern thought. The so called humanists were pioneering a rather convenient idea of natural rights to counter the brutality and intolerance they associated with conventional religion. This philosophy of human rights did not apply to all human beings.

Lo que distinguía a los nazis de otras sectas humanistas era una definición distinta de «humanidad», que estaba profundamente influida por la teoría de la evolución. En contraste con otros humanistas, los nazis creían que la humanidad no es algo universal y eterno, sino una especie mutable que puede evolucionar o degenerar. El hombre puede evolucionar hacia el superhombre o degenerar en un subhumano.

All those "why" questions are rooted in culture, which is to say, in ethical beliefs. I emphasize the point not to denigrate the achievements of scientists, but only to remind that natural science cannot by itself fathom the sources of the crisis it has identified, for the sources lie not in the nature that scientists study but in the human nature and, especially, in the human culture that historians and other humanists have made their study.

For the artists the humanists were the guarantors of their intellectual status, and the humanists themselves recognized the value of art as a mean of propaganda for the ideas on which their own intellectual supremacy is based.

that imperial guard which poets and humanists mount in relay around any great memory.

There is either one Christ or there is none. If Jesus was not the eternal Son of God, equal in power and glory with the Father, then let's have done with all talk about Christianity. Let us admit honestly that we are Unitarians, Jews, Buddhists, or humanists. But not Christians. For the historical Jesus said, Upon this rock, of the deity of Christ, I will build my Church. Some other organization may call itself a church, but it is not his.

The best scientists that I've met are those that are humanists and scientists at the same time.

One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.

The notion of a Judeo-Christian tradition, he says, is a myth invented by Enlightenment humanists to promote pluralistic social values.

Very few of the early Italian humanists were really humane.

Religious believers of the world, you are free to continue to debate the simple, narrow question that divides you from atheists, but you have no right, in so doing, to treat the Humanists of the world with contempt. You owe them a deep debt of gratitude, for not only have they shed much light on a naturally dark world but they have very probably helped civilize your own specific religion.

There were some great clinicians in the 20th century - great men. Freud was a genius; Jung was a genius, Carl Rogers was a genius - there's a half-dozen psychologists of the 1950s and humanists of the 1960s.

By then, the coupling of atheism with Communism had become a staple in the rhetoric of anti-Communist crusaders throughout the nation. Intellectuals as a group were highly vulnerable on this score because many were, if not unabashed atheists, secular humanists with little regard for traditional religion. If

these humanists rank with militant vegetarians and agrarian anarchists, and were about as well known—until the Religious Right set out to make them famous.

It is true that some liberals and humanists, along with the laid-back Danes, deny the existence of evil. This is largely because they regard the word 'evil' as a device for demonising those who are really nothing more than socially unfortunate.

Gutenberg's invention in the fifteenth century set off a "round of teeth gnashing" among early humanists, who worried that "printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery.

Christian humanists were engaged in a vast enterprise to make the spiritual and intellectual riches of ancient culture available to the Christian world; they did so with no sense of unease or internal conflict, for they believed that paganism – in other words, the 'forces of nature' themselves, not yet sanctified by the blessings of incarnation – could achieve splendid things in all areas of culture.

Liberal humanists now seem to dominate the fields of art, journalism, and communication, which are powerful and uniquely able to spread anti-Christian thought.

Liberals and humanists are always saying that art is the soul of truth.

A preoccupation with theory has been a defensive response by academic biographers in this country, I submit, to the condescension of traditional humanists and social scientists pervading higher education for many years.

Poetry is the flower of civilization," said Chesterton in one lecture. "Romanticism has worked itself out in our time in nonsense and dirt. We should remind the humanists that if poetry has become too personal it has also become unpoetic.

I've met secular humanists who grew up in evangelical households, for whom 'Cosmos' was their first exposure to a scientific way of viewing the world.

This is an example of why the humanists have always insisted that you don't learn to think wholly from one language: you learn to think better from linguistic conflict, from bouncing one language off another.