Humanism is the philosophy that you should be a good guest at the dinner table of life.

I believe that decisions about the timing and manner of death belong to the individual as a human right. I believe it is wrong to withhold medical methods of terminating life painlessly and swiftly when an individual has a rational and clear-minded sustained wish to end his or her life.

If there is anything worth fearing in the world, it is living in such a way that gives one cause for regret in the end.

I am putting together a secular bible. My Genesis is when the apple falls on Newton's head.

When I was 14 a chaplain at school gave me a reading list. I read everything and I went back to him with a question: how can you really believe in this stuff?

Socrates famously said that the unconsidered life is not worth living. He meant that a life lived without forethought or principle is a life so vulnerable to chance, and so dependent on the choices and actions of others, that it is of little real value to the person living it. He further meant that a life well lived is one which has goals, and integrity, which is chosen and directed by the one who lives it, to the fullest extent possible to a human agent caught in the webs of society and history.

And I say, the meaning of life is what you make it. There will be as many different meaningful lives as there are people to live them.