- “People can only live fully by helping others to live. When you give life to friends you truly live. Cultures can only realize their further richness by honoring other traditions. And only by respecting natural life can humanity continue to exist.” ― Daisaku Ikeda
- “Your world needs you. So, use your education to become endowed with muscles of iron and nerves of steel. Do not exploit the means of education to become a man or a woman. Use it to become a human being, in the pursuit of excellence.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost
- “The problem I want to talk to you about tonight is the problem of belief. What does it mean to believe? We use this word all the time, and I think behind it lurk some really extraordinary taboos and confusions. What I want to argue tonight is that how we talk about belief- how we fail to criticize or criticize the beliefs of others, has more importance to us personally, more consequence to us personally and to civilization than perhaps anything else that is in our power to influence. ” ― Sam Harris
- “If I had stuck to the contemporary definition of the purpose of scientific literature, I would have never been able to create the works that I have created. Science is the most influential tool of progress in the world, not one among many, but most, yet no scientist had tried to use it as a primary tool for harmony.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Lives to Serve Before I Sleep
- “Stand free and stand human, and the whole world will stand by you.” ― Abhijit Naskar, See No Gender
- “Acceptance does not mean accepting those who disregard humans on the basis of race, religion and sexual orientation.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Either Civilized or Phobic: A Treatise on Homosexuality
- “Life is to lift the world, not party.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Servitude is Sanctitude
- “Burn so bright that the world comes to life.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Build Bridges not Walls: In the name of Americana
- “It would be perfect if everyone who makes love, is in love, but this is simply an unrealistic expectation. I’d say 75 percent of the population of people who make love, are not in love, this is simply the reality of the human race, and to be idealistic about this is to wait for the stars to aline and Jupiter to change color; for the Heavens to etch your names together in the sky before you make love to someone. But idealism is immaturity, and as a matter of fact, the stars may never aline, Jupiter may never change color, and the Heavens may never ever etch your names together in the sky for you to have the never-ending permission to make endless love to one another. And so the bottom line is, there really is no difference between doing something today, and doing something tomorrow, because today is what you have, and tomorrow may not turn out the way you expect it to. At the end of the day, sex is an animalistic, humanistic, passionate desire.” ― C. JoyBell C.
- “but in Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full no private man can want anything; for among them there is no unequal distribution, so that no man is poor, none in necessity, and though no man has anything, yet they are all rich; for what can make a man so rich as to lead a serene and chreerful life, free from anxieties; neither apprehending want himself, nor vexed with the endless complaints of his wife?” ― Thomas More, Utopia
- “Madness for humanity is true sanity, and sanity through indifference is utter insanity.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Sleepless for Society
- “Certainly, we can no longer look upon the canon of Western art – Greco-Roman as revived, extended, and graced by the Renaissance – as -the- tradition in art, or even any longer as distinctly and uniquely -ours-. That canon is in fact only one tradition among many, and indeed in its strict adherence to representational form is rather the exception in the whole gallery of -human- art. Such an extension of the resources of the past, for the modern artist, implies a different and more comprehensive understanding of the term “human” itself: a Sumerian figure of a fertility goddess is as “human” to us as a Greek Aphrodite. When the sensibility of an age can accommodate the alien “inhuman” forms of primitive art side by side with the classic “human” figures of Greece or the Renaissance, it should be obvious that the attitude toward man that we call classical humanism – which is the intellectual expression of the spirit that informs the classical canon of Western art – has also gone by the boards.” ― William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy
- “Human you are, and your religion, Humanism.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Principia Humanitas
- “A human who is truly human won’t be able to live within walls, they wouldn’t be able to breathe, only the primitives feel secure behind walls.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Time to End Democracy: The Meritocratic Manifesto
- “People keep asking me, how do I frame my work of science and philosophy in such a humane fashion – somehow they believe there’s some sort of method for doing that – and I can’t manage to convey it to them that I know no other way to put it – if you ask a river, how does it flow the way it does, can the river give you a diagram or method, it can’t – the same is with me – I don’t know any other way in which to present my ideas.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Servitude is Sanctitude
- “We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth,Neither mortal or immortal, So that with freedom of choice and with honor, As thought the maker and molder of thyself, Thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power out of thy soul’s judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.” ― Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man
- “As humanism freed us from the chains of superstition, let transhumanism free us from our biological chains.” ― Simon Young, Designer Evolution: A Transhumanist Manifesto
- “He who thinks that the working class can be assured, prosperity and freedom by organizing economic life on a militaristic basis is wrong. No less erroneous is it to strive for a dictatorship for the purpose of crushing the enemy and establishing the working class in a privileged position in the state and society while reducing the rest of the population to the position of pariahs as a means of ultimately establishing socialist equality for all. But most objectionable of all would be to attempt to build a regime of humanity upon the basis of brutality, seeing that without the former no true Socialist commonwealth can exist. For this commonwealth must represent the realization of the slogan of the French Revolution, which was “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” ― Karl Kautsky, Social Democracy Versus Communism
- “It is when we think we can act like God, that all respect is lost, and I think this is the downfall of peace. We lie if we say we do not see color and culture and difference. We fool ourselves and cheat ourselves when we say that all of us are the same. We should not want to be the same as others and we should not want others to be the same as us. Rather, we ought to glory and shine in all of our differences, flaunting them fabulously for all to see! It is never a conformity that we need! We need not to conform! What we need is to burst out into all these beautiful colors!” ― C. JoyBell C.
- “Often pastors as well as my fellow scientists ask me – are you a believer or non-believer – I smile and reply, all I care about is to abolish the barriers that people have raised among themselves. I work to create living Christs in every field of society to take care of every corner of the world.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Good Scientist: When Science and Service Combine
- “How dare a person tell a woman, how to dress, how to talk, how to behave! Any being who does that, is no human.” ― Abhijit Naskar, The Bengal Tigress: A Treatise on Gender Equality
- “I am not interested in peddling myself as an expert, all I am interested in is to make sure that when the humans look at the mirror they see a human, instead of seeing a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, an Atheist, an American, an European, a Russian, an Asian or anything else.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Monk Meets World
- “The questioning of any and all entities, including belief and its objects, is one of Christianity’s most impressive legacies; and humanism, its rebellious child, must not be prevented from developing this legacy [ «et l’humanisme, son enfant rebelle, ne saurait être empêché de développer ce legs. » ].” ― Julia Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe
- “Yesterday I was seeking happiness for myself and I was miserable, today I seek it for others and I am the happiest person on earth.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Servitude is Sanctitude
- “Service is the only path to greatness.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Lives to Serve Before I Sleep
- “The only way you can see someone turn water into wine without resorting to trickery is if you are already drunk. That’s not the kind of miracle that the world needs – what the world needs is the miracle of kindness – it needs the miracle of acceptance – it needs the miracle of unity in diversity.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Good Scientist: When Science and Service Combine
- “Destroy such shining altars that spread bigotry – demolish such glorious churches and temples that proclaim divine supremacy – burn such glistening crucifixes, scriptures and idols that are used to preach weakness and segregation – obliterate every single trace of orthodoxy from the face of this planet, not with violence, but with awareness – and work – work to uplift the downtrodden – work to elevate the impoverished – work to raise those abandoned by fortune and opportunity – only then you shall have the rightful place under the sun as a holy human being.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Lives to Serve Before I Sleep
- “It is high time that you break the shackles of separatism and with the glorious flames of love, compassion and humanism in heart, you assimilate the goodness from all around you. Let love and compassion reign over the modern human civilization and hatred be a matter of ancient history.” ― Abhijit Naskar, Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost
- “It is no longer just engineers who dominate our technology leadership, because it is no longer the case that computers are so mysterious that only engineers can understand what they are capable of. There is an industry-wide shift toward more “product thinking” in leadership–leaders who understand the social and cultural contexts in which our technologies are deployed.Products must appeal to human beings, and a rigorously cultivated humanistic sensibility is a valued asset for this challenge. That is perhaps why a technology leader of the highest status–Steve Jobs–recently credited an appreciation for the liberal arts as key to his company’s tremendous success with their various i-gadgets.” ― Damon Horowitz
- “We live in an unbelieving age but one which is markedly and lopsidedly spiritual. There is one type of modern man who recognizes spirit in himself but who fails to recognize a being outside himself whom he can adore as Creator and Lord; consequently he has become his own ultimate concern. He says with Swinburne, “Glory to man in the highest, for he is the master of things,” or with Steinbeck, “In the end was the word and the word was with men.” For him, man has his own natural spirit of courage and dignity and pride and must consider it a point of honor to be satisfied with this. There is another type of modern man who recognizes a divine being not himself, but who does not believe that this being can be known anagogically or defined dogmatically or received sacramentally. Spirit and matter are separated for him. Man wanders about, caught in a maze of guilt he can’t identify, trying to reach a God he can’t approach, a God powerless to approach him. And there is another type of modern man who can neither believe nor contain himself in unbelief and who searches desperately, feeling about in all experience for the lost God.” ― Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose