Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.
Interpretation
Being a Humanist focuses on moral behavior for its own sake, rather than for future rewards or consequences.
This quote by Kurt Vonnegut highlights the essence of Humanism, which advocates for ethical conduct based on empathy and decency, rather than on religious or spiritual incentives. It suggests that one should strive to act well in life purely for the sake of kindness and morality, independent of any notions of reward or punishment in an afterlife.
In practice
In a graduation speech to emphasize the importance of ethical living.
But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.
I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.
How subservient to Jesus, or to a humane God Almighty, were the leaders of this country back in the 1840's, when Marx said such a supposedly evil thing about religion? They had made it perfectly legal to own human slaves, and weren't going to led women vote or hold public office, God forbid, for another eighty year.
All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States - and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - "God damn it, you've got to be kind."
If what Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians is true, that we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be, I am not overjoyed. Still--if I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice.
The fortunate circumstances of our lives are generally found, at last, to be of our own producing.
What a miserable thing life is: you're in clover; only the clover isn't good enough.
You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people's brains. It's a less detailed copy, it's coarse-grained.
We forget that the world is what we imagine it to be. We stop being the sun and become, instead, the pool of water reflecting it.
Out of the experience of extraordinary human disaster that lasted too long, must be born a society of which all humanity will be proud.
Remember: The best deceivers do everything they can to cloak their roguish qualities. They cultivate an air of honesty in one area to disguise their dishonesty in others. Honesty is merely another decoy in their arsenal of weapons.
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