On a grassroots level we say that man can touch more than he can grasp.
I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies.
Science, which has transformed the material world, gives man the power of transforming himself.
We were all born carrying a promise -- a promise to make the world better -- and there's a yearning to make good on that promise that none of us can suppress forever.
A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.
The greatest handicap a person has is not realizing his potential.
Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power
Your highest thought, however, ye shall have it commanded unto you by me - and it is this: man is something that is to be surpassed.
Specialization is for insects... The race of man? He's a whole other creature.
What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.
To become what we are capable of becoming is the only end in life.
Our souls must become expanded by the contemplation of Nature's grandeur, before we can fully comprehend the greatness of man.
Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact — everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.
Treat people the way they are and they will stay that way. Treat people the way they can become and they will become that way.
No man can change himself into anything from sheer reason; he can only change into what he potentially is.
Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.
Those 62 million girls who are not being educated around the world impact my life in Washington, D.C., in the United States of America. Because if we aren't empowering and providing the skills and the resources to half of our population, then we're not realizing our full potential as a society, as mankind.
If we take people only as they are, then we make them worse; if we treat them as if they were what they should be, then we bring them to where they can be brought.
"What would you do with the lazy ones, who would not work?" "No one is lazy. They grow hopeless from the misery of their present existence, and give up. Under our order of things, every man would do the work he liked, and would have as much as his neighbor, so could not be unhappy and discouraged."
The only limits on human achievement are self-imposed.
I want it to be the greatest thing I ever do: make good humans.
Man was not made for the world, but the world for man.
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
These are our children. We will all profit by and pay for whatever they become.
A man is not a wall, whose stones are crushed upon the road; or a pipe, whose fragments are thrown away at a street corner. The fragments of an intellect are always good.
