The highest ethical duty is often to discard the outmoded ethics of the past.

For the Humanist, . . . head and heart . . . must function together. . . . The constitution of the Phillips Exeter Academy reads: 'Though goodness without knowledge . . . is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous. . . . Both united form the noblest character and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind.'

True freedom is the capacity for acting according to one's true character, to be altogether one's self, to be self-determined and not subject to outside coercion.

The wise man looks at death with honesty, dignity and calm, recognizing that the tragedy it brings is inherent in the great gift of life.

Human beings and their actions constitute the advancing front, the surging crest of an ongoing movement that never stops.

To define twentieth-century humanism briefly, I would say that it is a philosophy of joyous service for the greater good of all humanity in this natural world and advocating the methods of reason, science, and democracy.

There is no place in the Humanist worldview for either immortality or God in the valid meanings of those terms. Humanism contends that instead of the gods creating the cosmos, the cosmos, in the individualized form of human beings giving rein to their imagination, created the gods.