Humanly Possible Quotes

“Whenever we see leaders or ideologies overruling the conscience, liberty, and reasoning of actual human beings with the promise of something higher, anti-humanism is probably in the ascendant.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Thus, to use language well is about more than adding decorative twiddles; it is about moving other people to emotion and recognition. It is a moral activity, because being able to communicate well is at the heart of humanitas—of being human in the fullest way.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“You can generally be sure, whenever ideologues speak of true or serious freedom, that it will be at the expense of actual, ordinary freedom. And when the rhetoric is transcendental, the reality will probably be miserable.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“The state, becoming the ultimate source of value for each person, plays a role similar to that of God: Fascism is avowedly “a religious conception”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Humboldt thus asserts the key principle of political liberalism. The government is not there to tell people whom to marry, or what to believe or say, or how to worship, but mainly to make sure their choices do not harm others.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“The scathing one now puts forward a different definition altogether. “It’s a philosophy that rejects supernaturalism, regards man as a natural object and asserts the essential dignity and worth of man and his capacity to achieve self-realisation through the use of reason and the scientific method.” This is well received, until someone else raises a problem: some people do believe in God, yet they call themselves humanists. The meeting ends with everyone more confused than they were at the start.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Like most inventions that improve human life, the printing press met with skepticism and resistance”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“We could add more for our own time: a whole breed of authoritarian, fundamentalist, illiberal, repressive, war-mongering, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, nationalist, and populist manipulators, some of whom claim devotion to traditional religious pieties, whether or not this is sincere. They show contempt for actual human lives yet promise—always!—something higher and better. As enemies of humanism, and of human well-being, they must be taken seriously.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“The novelist William Golding said of the Second World War that “anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.” His nihilistic and grotesque fable Lord of the Flies, depicting the moral degeneration of a group of boys stranded on a remote island, was an expression of that thought. He explained that he had not previously had such negative views, but such was the spirit of those times.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“The philosopher Hannah Arendt put it neatly in her postwar study of totalitarian life: “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Humanities-based, ethical forms of humanism remind us that we are spiritual, cultured, and moral beings: we are formed by our human environment as well as by our physical nature. Scientific humanism reminds us that we are animals, too, and that we live in a constant process of transition on a changing Earth, in a very large universe. If everything is in a good balance, these visions of ourselves do not work at cross-purposes; they inform and enhance one another.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Instead of being content to develop alone, the individual should be “continually doing all he can to enlarge and increase the volume of the human stream sweeping thitherward.” Arnold has me at “thitherward.” I’ve long thought the family of terms including thither and thence (“to there” and “from there”) should be brought back into usage, and here he is doing something even better.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Mill’s human element improves liberalism. It distinguishes it, for example, from the travesty now described as “neoliberalism,” which allows the rich to pursue profit without regulation while the rest of the population is left to deal with the consequences of such ravaging of society.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“until 1933, that is, when the Nazis came to power and threw out its humanistic ideals entirely. They replaced Humboldt’s model with a giant indoctrination machine, designed to turn boys into warriors and girls into mothers for producing more warriors. The forming of well-rounded, fully human, free, cultured individuals had no place in the Fascists’ world. They had no wish to “humanize” anyone; quite the opposite.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Humboldt thus asserts the key principle of political liberalism. The government is not there to tell people whom to marry, or what to believe or say, or how to worship, but mainly to make sure their choices do not harm others. We do not need a grand moral vision from our state; we need it to provide the underlying conditions for a decent life, and for our freedom.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“It is not perfect, but a good rule of the humanist thumb is to say that, if you don’t like being told to stay silent and invisible, or being enslaved and abused, or being unable to get into buildings because no one thought to install a ramp, or being considered less than human, then the chances are that other people are not fond of it, either.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Eloquence—as the humanists of earlier centuries, and orators in every culture, had always known—is of essential importance to human beings. Language in general is our very element: the basis of our social and moral lives. It enables us to work out our intellectual critiques of the existing world in detail, to apply our best reasonings to it, and to imagine in words how things might be different—and then to persuade others of these imaginings and reasonings.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“David Hume was living, laughing proof of the point made by his spokesman in his own Dialogues: “The smallest grain of natural honesty and benevolence has more effect on men’s conduct, than the most pompous views, suggested by theological theories and systems.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Instead, Paine’s preferred principles were humanist ones: be grateful for life, do not make a cult of suffering, be tolerant toward others, and try to deal with problems as rationally as possible. He summed up his Enlightenment humanist credo: I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“In the Netherlands, too, Spinoza had resorted to manuscript circulation in the previous century. A few of his works did come out in his lifetime, but his great opus, Ethics, was passed around among his friends in handwritten form only. On his deathbed, he asked those friends to send a chest full of such papers by barge to Amsterdam, where more copies and translations could be made, hopefully leading to a posthumous printed edition. This was done while both Dutch Protestant and Catholic authorities, having heard rumors about what was happening, followed in hot pursuit. The Catholics even recruited an Amsterdam rabbi to try to find out where the manuscripts were. Three sets of religious hounds were thus set on the trail, but all three failed to pin down the manuscripts in time to thwart publication.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Incidentally, given that humans do seem inclined to such responses, it is hard to comprehend why one is supposed to rejoice at the thought of others suffering in hell. Yet this was apparently no problem for such early theologians as Tertullian, who wrote that watching anti-Christian persecutors burn would be more fun for Christians than the circus, theater, and racecourse rolled into one.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“He had no time for the idea that “we gratify heaven and nature by committing massacre and homicide, a belief universally embraced in all religions.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“These were times of the kind when fanatics are admired for the intensity of their commitment, while those who prefer tolerance or compromise are vilified.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“traveling, reading, and friendship. Those were the three great themes of his life, and each of them fed the others. Traveling brought endless new friends; friends brought new projects, appointments, and ideas for further study; and these in turn prompted further travels. And so it went on. He followed where these opportunities led, sometimes staying for long periods, sometimes only briefly passing through. As he once said: “My home is wherever I keep my library.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Erasmus produced a series of treatises on the subject of training the young in humanistic life and techniques of study. Like Celtis and others, he thought it was vital for students to acquire good manners—which is to say, ways of expressing fellow feeling and consideration for others. His 1530 work De civilitate morum puerilium, or On Good Manners for Boys, summed up the dos and don’ts of civilized behavior. Don’t wipe your nose on your sleeve, but blow it with a handkerchief—not too loudly, because trumpeting is for elephants. If you must sneeze, turn away from others, and when people bless you (or when you assume they have, since while sneezing you won’t hear them), raise your cap in acknowledgment. When you spit, aim it so you don’t spray people. Look after your teeth, although there is no need to whiten them with powder. “To brush them with urine is a custom of the Spaniards.” Don’t toss your hair like a frolicsome horse. To deal with intestinal gas, opinions differ: some say you should clench your buttocks to block its exit, yet “it is no part of good manners to bring illness upon yourself,” so just be considerate and step away from others, or at least cover the sound with a cough. While doing all this, maintain an easy, relaxed look. “The brow also should be cheerful and smooth, indicating a good conscience and an open mind: not lined with wrinkles, a sign of old age; not irresolute like a hedgehog’s; not menacing like a bull’s.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“It took another Padua anatomist, Realdo Colombo, to correct him. Realdo even knew what it was for, which implies that he had noticed it in contexts other than the dissection table. He named it “amor Veneris, vel dulcedo” (“love of Venus, or thing of pleasure”), gave details of its role in women’s sexual experiences, and remarked, “It cannot be said how astonished I am that so many famous anatomists had not even an inkling of such a lovely thing, perfected with such art for the sake of such utility.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Dispute and contradiction, not veneration and obedience, are the essence of intellectual life.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“I have noticed in early twenty-first-century Britain that an ability to sling around Latin quotations while behaving like a cad can still take you a long way.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“Cicero drew a distinction between virtuous eloquence and the mayhem created by demagogues.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

“The whole era that we think of as the “Renaissance” in Europe, with its ongoing revival of classical wisdom and knowledge, its explosions of artistic brilliance, its development of better medicine and more productive modes of inquiry—all of this happened while people were dying at regular intervals from a disease that no one understood.”
― Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope