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Humanism Quotes

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Humanism Quotes

“One human life is a thousand times more valuable than a thousand bibles, qurans, suttas and vedas - one human life is a thousand times more valuable than a thousand doctrines and rituals - one human life is a thousand times more valuable than a thousand theories and schools of thought - one human life is a thousand times more valuable than a thousand religions and ideologies.”

“Our leaders have not loved men: they have loved ideas, and have been willing to sacrifice passionate men on the altars of the blood-drinking, ever-ash-thirsty ideal. Has President Wilson, or Karl Marx, or Bernard Shaw ever felt one hot blood-pulse of love for the working man, the half-conscious, deluded working man? Never. Each of these leaders has wanted to abstract him away from his own blood and being, into some foul Methuselah or abstraction of a man.”

“Beyond sufism, beyond advaita, beyond christian mysticism, beyond humanism, beyond atheism, agnosticism and pantheism, there is a river - a river that's pure - a river that's chaste - a river that’s incorruptible - a river that has the power to breathe life into even the most degraded society - but you can't find it anywhere, for it doesn't exist in the way we usually perceive existence, that is, it doesn't exist as a tangible physical river, like the Hudson or the Thames or the Nile - rather it exists as particles in your brain, and all it needs is the right kick to get formed. And when enough such rivers start flowing from the fountainhead of enough awake brains, the whole world will turn into an ocean of vigor, virtue and love.”

“Geography divides people only if the people allow it - faith divides people only if the people allow it - intellect divides people only if the people allow it - politics divides people only if the people allow it. So, unless the people allow it, nothing can tear our world apart. Unless you allow it, nothing can tear our society apart.”

“To unite this whole world with the thread of acceptance and harmony, may sound like a titanic task, but all it takes is one generation of conscientious and responsible citizens in each nation - if only these handful of young members of the society around the world take up the responsibility to raise, not citizens of a nation, but citizens of a planet, then no force in the world can keep the process of unification of humans manifesting in front of our eyes.”

“As [Isaiah] Berlin wrote to George Kennan in 1951, 'What we violently reject is ... the very idea that there are circumstances in which one has a right to get at, and shape the characters and souls of other men for purposes which these men, if they realized what we were doing, might reject.' The respect for individual liberty goes hand in hand with the recognition of human dignity as a fundamental principle and is incompatible with treating human beings as sheer material to be conditioned and shaped at will.”

“[Author's Note:] When my grandmother came to the United States from Puerto Rico in the 1940s, she was a beautiful, glamorous woman from a wealthy family in the capital city, and the young bride of a dashing naval officer. She expected to be received as such. Instead, she found that people here had a very reductionist view of what it meant to be Puerto Rican, of what it meant to be Latinx. Everything about her confused her new neighbors: her skin tone, her hair, her accent, her notions. She wasn't what they expected a boricua to be. My grandmother spent much of her adult life in the States but didn't always feel welcome here. She resented the perpetual gringo misconceptions about her. She never got past that resentment, and the echoes of her indignation still have some peculiar manifestations in my family today. One of the symptoms is me. Always raging against a perceived slight, always fighting against ignorance in mainstream ideas about ethnicity and culture. I'm acutely aware that the people coming to our southern border are not one faceless brown mass but singular individuals, with stories and backgrounds and reasons for coming that are unique. I feel this awareness in my spine, in my DNA. So I hoped to present one of those unique personal stories - a work of fiction - as a way to honor the hundreds of thousands of stories we may never get to hear. And in so doing, I hope to create a pause where the reader may begin to individuate. When we see migrants on the news, we may remember: these people are people.”

“Our uniqueness implies unique responsibility that we as individuals have in the world. It also implies an unavoidable loneliness. Here Ghandi’s words come to mind: “Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.” We are all minorities of one in the sense of our uniqueness and loneliness. But in searching for the truth and the meaning of our lives, we “intercept” with others who are doing the same and our loneliness at least will not have to be experienced as isolation. And in chess too, we “intercept” with others in this common interest that is much like life, where everything we do matters, where we have to participate responsibly, and the more responsible our participation is, the more we feel at home. As such it can have a highly affirmative effect on the person, a sense that the individual gets: “Yes, I belong to this world, I am part of how things get decided, of how things get achieved. I share this with others.”

“I am the Vedanta, I am the Bible, I am the Quran, I am the God Cell. I am the Torah, I am the Suttas, I am the Hadith, I am Humanitas. I am the Son, I am Jehovah, I am the Qi, I am Bismillah. I am the Vivek, I am the Ananda, I am the Bodhi, I am the Sattva. I am the Sat, I am the Shri, I am Akaal, I am Brahmasmi. I am the Prophet, I am Aminah, I am the Mother, I am the Krishna. I am the Beginning, I am the Anth, I am the Journey, I am Ananth. I am Creation, I am the Ravager, I am Qayamat, I am the Creator.”

“There is no greater happiness than in relieving the sorrow of others. There is no greater joy, than being an ingredient in the joy of others. There is no greater patriotism than this - there is no greater humanism than this - there is no greater religion than this - there is no higher divinity than this.”

“I have a dream - that one day, black people won't be black - white people won't be white - brown people won't be brown - gay people won't be gay - straight people won't be straight - women won't be women - men won't be men - the trans won't be trans - believers won't be believers and non-believers won't be non-believers - instead, we all will be just human.”

“My body is a temple and each cell in it holds the image of my God - my humankind. Whatever I do I do for my God - whatever I create I create to serve my God - whatever I discover I discover to aid my God. My work is my offering to my God - my life is my offering to my God, for I have nothing grander to offer than my life.”

“Afro-Americans accepted Christianity's celebration of the individual soul and turned it into a weapon of personal community survival. But their apparent indifference to sin, not to be confused with an indifference to injustice or wrongdoing, guaranteed retention of the collective, life-affirming quality of the African tradition and thus also became a weapon for personal and community survival. The slaves shaped Christianity they had embraced; they conquered the religion of those who had conquered them. In their formulation, Christianity lacked that terrible inner tension between the sense of guilt and the sense of mission which once provided the ideological dynamism for Western civilization's march to world power. But in return for this loss of revolutionary dynamism, the slaves developed an Afro-American and Christian humanism that affirmed joy in life in the face of every trial.”

“At our own free will, we must make this declaration to ourselves today - the declaration of justice - the declaration of order - the declaration of a united independence from the oppression of prejudices, hate and segregation. In the course of human events, if ever, injustice grabs hold of the landscape that we the people step foot on, it will be our organically divine right to abolish such injustice, with our thoughts, words and actions conscientious. We the people, each one of us, will do our utmost to create a society that needs not the intervention of law or any specialist authority. We will create a society of humans with our own two hands for the humans that are yet to be born, so that they may know justice and order in their life, which we have been deprived of due to the indifference and callousness of our ancestors. We the living, breathing and thinking humans do solemnly declare upon our functional conscience, that from this moment onwards, we will no longer adhere to the traditional habit of dependency, hypocrisy and meekness, and we will come to the aid of every human who faces injustice in any form, with this golden principle engraved upon our hearts, that there are no foreigners, only family.”

“Where there is love, there is justice - where there is no love, there is no justice. And love is the purest form of expectation-less kindness, hence kindness itself is justice. So, to be kind is, to be loving, and to be loving is, to be just. Call it love, call it kindness, call it spirituality, call it justice, it's all one.”