I would define myself as a Marxian, and that means of course also as a humanist.

There is a creative pleasure, which, for instance, the artisan in the Middle Ages, or in a country like Mexico, still today has - namely the pleasure of creating something. You find quite a few skilled workers who still have that pleasure: maybe in a steel mill; maybe a worker who works with a complicated machine - he has a sense that he is creating something.

The most important factor for the development of the individual is the structure and the values of the society into which he was born.

Free man is by necessity insecure, thinking man by necessity uncertain.

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.

To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge.

If I love the other person, I feel one with him or her, but with him as he is, not as I need him to be as an object for my use. Respect thus implies the absence of exploitation: it allows the other to be, to change and to develop 'in his own ways.' This requires a commitment to know the other as a separate being, and not merely as a reflection of my own ego. According to Velleman this loving willingness and ability to see the other as they really are is foregrounded in our willingness to risk self-exposure.