A humanist has four leading characteristics - curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race. - E. M. Forster

There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.

"In his ordinary voice, so that she scarcely realized he was quoting poetry, he said:

"'From far, from eve and morning,

And yon twelve-winded sky,

The stuff of life to knit me

Blew hither: here am I'

George and I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don't believe in this world sorrow.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.