There’s nothing I can say about humanist values that hasn’t been said before, so I make no apologies for the quotes below. George Eliot comes first because it was through her novels that I first started thinking about humanism, before I realised it had a name.

“Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.   What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other?

– Attributed to George Eliot

“The value of life lies not in its length, but in the use we make of it.”

– Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), Essays

“Nothing in life is to be feared.  It is only to be understood.”

– Attributed to Marie Curie (1867-1934)

Written at the Millennium, this could just as easily apply at other times, whether a new season or a time of personal – or world – crisis.

Mental Fight: Time to be Real VI

Everyone loves a Spring cleaning.
Let’s have a humanity cleaning.
Open up history’s chamber of horrors
And clear out the skeletons behind the mirrors,
Put our breeding nightmares to flight
Transform our monsters with our light.
Clear out the stables
In our celebrated fables
A giant cleaning
Is no mean undertaking.
A cleaning of pogroms and fears
Of genocide and tears
Of torture and slavery
Hatred and brutality .
Let’s turn around and face them
Let’s turn around and face them
The bullies that our pasts have become
Let’s turn around and face them
Let’s make this clearing-out moment
A legendary material atonement.

Ben Okri