Occupation: Professor Birth: December 21, 1925 Death: October 22, 2012
Human life has no meaning independent of itself. There is no cosmic force or deity to give it meaning or significance. There is no ultimate destiny f….
Many humanists have argued that happiness involves a combination of hedonism and creative moral development; that an exuberant life fuses excellence ….
The skeptic has no illusions about life, nor a vain belief in the promise of immortality. Since this life here and now is all we can know, our most r….
I believe that a person should take an affirmative outlook. There are always problems in life, old and new, uncertainties, and unexpected contingenci….
Skepticism is essential to the quest for knowledge, for it is in the seedbed of puzzlement that genuine inquiry takes root. Without skepticism, we ma….
Humanists hold that ethical values are relative to human experience and need not be derived from theological or metaphysical foundations..
We need to be skeptical of utopianists who offer unreliable totalistic visions of other worlds and strive to take us there. We need some ideals, but ….
Secular humanism is avowedly non-religious. It is a eupraxsophy (good practical wisdom), which draws its basic principles and ethical values from sci….
Most humans feel the transcendent temptation, the emotional drive to festoon the universe with large-scale meaning..
No one is infallible, and no one can claim a monopoly on truth or virtue. It would be contradictory for skepticism to seek to translate itself into a….
Three key humanist virtues are courage, cognition, and caring - not dependence, ignorance, or insensitivity to the needs of others..
We cannot remain silent when someone of the Pope's stature and credibility confuses religious principles for science.
Homo religiosus invents religious symbols, which he venerates and worships to save him from facing the finality of his death and dissolution. He devi….
Only a fool of a scientist would dismiss the evidence and reports in front of him and substitute his own beliefs in their place..
Parents have no right to impose their religion on their children... A Fundamentalist Protestant parent has no right to expect the state to support hi….
The meaning of life is not to be discovered only after death in some hidden, mysterious realm; on the contrary, it can be found by eating the succule….
Secular humanism does not have the essential attributes of a religion: belief in a deity, the wish for some sort of afterlife, sacred dogma or texts,….
The overriding need is "to develop a new Planetary Humanism" that will seek to preserve human rights and enhance human freedom and dignity and will e….
No diety will save us; we must save ourselves..
It is not the courage to be that we must develop as much as the courage to become. We are responsible for our destiny. The meaning of life is not loc….
A skeptic is one who is willing to question any truth claim, asking for clarity in definition, consistency in logic, and adequacy of evidence..