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'Racism has relied on pseudo-scientific grounds for decades. Science cannot justify the bigotry of racists.' Our Vice President, Adam Rutherford, author of How to Argue with a Racist and Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics. #HumanistBookshelf.

‘Race is real because we perceive it. Racism is real because we enact it. Neither race nor racism has foundations in science.’

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'The humanist view of life is progressive and optimistic, in awe of human potential, living without fear of judgement or death, and finding enough purpose and meaning in life , love, and leaving a good legacy.' Humanists UK Vice President Polly Toynbee. Great themes found in any #HumanistBookshelf

‘What matters is not what nature has given us but what we choose to do about it. The humanist view of life is progressive and optimistic, in awe of human potential, living without fear of judgement or death, finding enough purpose and meaning in life, love, and leaving a good legacy.’

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Eloquently put, as always. The works of A C Grayling sit on many a #HumanistBookshelf, including, but not limited to: The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism, The History of Philosophy, The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life, Democracy and Its Crisis.

‘To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.’

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The brilliant Janet Ellis, President of Humanists UK, on discovering humanism and the global community that comes with it. Find Janet's #HumanistBookshelf recommendations on our website! Link in bio.

‘Humanism is important for me because it puts a name to the beliefs and values that so many non-religious people like me already have. It gives those values a proper place in our society and in our lives. It’s not just me saying ‘I think this’. In fact, I’m part of a community of like-minded people with similar ideas, approaches, and moral convictions. And we’re so much stronger when we come together.’

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We love this from our Vice President Shaparak Khorsandi, author of Scatter Brain, Kissing Emma, Nina Is Not OK and A Beginner's Guide to Acting English. #HumanistBookshelf

‘The humanist perspective is a profound and inspiring one – and it’s not just a modern perspective. Through the centuries and all around the world, people have looked to reason and to science in place of superstition and sought to make the most out of the one life they have. It’s crucial that this voice is heard.’ Shaparak Khorsandi

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Some lovely words on the humanist approach to life by our patron Stephen Fry, author of Mythos, Heroes, Troy, Moab Is My Washpot, The Fry Chronicles, The Hippopotamus and The Liar. #HumanistBookshelf.

‘Humanism is an approach to life which encourages ethical and fulfilling living on the basis of reason and humanity, and rejects superstition and religion. The most immediate impact of living as a humanist is that we believe this life is all there is – so what we do and the choices we make really count.’ Stephen FryActor, author, humanist

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Our Vice President Alice Roberts on the humanist approach to life, as taken from the #TheLittleBookofHumanism, a recommended title for your #HumanistBookshelf!

Throughout history there have been non-religious people who have believed that this life is the only life we have, that the universe is a natural phenomenon with no supernatural side - using reason and humanity to guide us... Today, people who hold these beliefs and values are called humanists' Alice Roberts, Scientist, author, humanist.

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If you want to help change someone's life, please, donate generously today. humanists.uk/donate/actio...

“I was excommunicated because I couldn’t keep up the pretense. I still feel the loss of certainty 40 years later, but I now live honestly with myself.”
Jasmine, to anyone who is leaving a high-control religious group.

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So many of you have been deeply moved by Sunday's BBC Radio 4 documentary 'Faithless', which followed four people who left high-control religions: Micki, Esther, Nicola and Colin, all supported by us. humanists.uk/2026/09/23/g...

“You are all so brave. As a humanist, I feel it is so important to stand with people who have left controlling religions as they rebuild their lives.”
A message from our supporter, Jess, to anyone who is leaving a high-control religious group.

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We're very touched by the messages and donations coming through to @faith2faithless.bsky.social. We've raised £20,645 so far. That's 42% of our target. Will you help us reach 50% by the end of the day? Donate now: humanists.uk/donate/actio...

Faith to Faithless
“You will realise that you are, have always been and will always be worthy of unconditional love. The world is full of kind, loving, compassionate humans, all working to make it a better place.”
A message from our supporter, Sarah, to anyone who is leaving a high-control religious group.

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If you want to help free someone from fear and isolation cause by leaving a high-control religion, please donate generously today. You can help change someone's life. humanists.uk/donate/actio...

Change someone's life right now. Donate and help us reach someone in distress.

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For so many people, we are that lifeline. We train the police, NHS staff, and social services to recognise the signs of religious coercive control. We run a helpline. And we bring people together to find community and support, often for the first time outside their religious group.

Your family. Your friends. Your home. The people you have known all your life. Donate today humanists.uk/faithtofaithless2026

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Humanists UK @humanists.uk · 24/09/2026

No one should live in fear for wanting to be free of dogmatic control. No one should lose their children, be shunned by those they love, or find themselves with no home, no support, and no one to turn to. Leaving one of these groups can mean losing everything. humanists.uk/donate/actio...

Leaving a coercive religious community can mean losing everything.

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50,000 couples a year would choose a legal humanist wedding in England and Wales. Our trained and accredited celebrants are ready. The Government needs to make it legal.

A couple celebrate their wedding. Headline reads: Humanists UK: Couples are waiting. Humanist celebrants are ready.

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Humanists UK @humanists.uk · 23/09/2026

Named for Moncure Daniel Conway, abolitionist, freethinker, and former leader of the South Place Ethical Society (a precursor to Humanists UK), it was intended to embody and invigorate humanist values and continue the society's lively programme of activities. heritage.humanists.uk/moncure-conw...

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Humanists UK @humanists.uk · 23/09/2026

Of all the books we've been recommended for our #HumanistBookshelf, Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark has been recommended more than any other. It's easy to see why.

‘I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues... when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.’ Carl Sagan. Cosmologist, author, humanist.

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Humanists UK @humanists.uk · 23/09/2026

These aren’t isolated conversions. Catholic dioceses are bringing more publicly funded schools into church-controlled academy trusts. Staff are now questioning the loss of local control. We’ve warned this risks concentrating power over admissions, staffing, RE, and worship in religious bodies.

An empty classroom. Headline reads: Lancashire school strikes expose tensions over Catholic academy consolidation

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Humanist weddings have transformed how people marry in Scotland and Northern Ireland, by allowing non-religious couples to have meaningful ceremonies true to their beliefs. Couples in Yorkshire have waited long enough for the same right.

Two brides holding hands during a wedding ceremony, overlaid with a news headline about humanist celebrants in Yorkshire hoping for wedding law reform as a consultation concludes.

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A seminal book on the role of women in society, The Second Sex by French existentialist and humanist Simone de Beauvoir is a classic that examines the status of women and challenges the deeply ingrained social norms that perpetuate gender inequality. #Humanistbookshelf

‘Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly. Let but the future be opened to her, and she will no longer be compelled to linger in the present.’

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The most powerful thing about reading is discovering words for what we've always felt but never could say. Baldwin was a master at this.

‘You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.’

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For millions, Terry Pratchett opened the door to a lifelong love of reading. The passage below, from Reaper Man, has always struck us as one of his most moving – a humanist meditation on death and legacy that continues to be read at humanist funerals today. #GNUTerryPratchett

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Jehovah’s Witnesses have announced a major change to their long-standing ban on blood transfusions. Members can now choose for themselves whether to accept red blood cells, white blood cells, plasma, and platelets. In practice this means that almost all modern blood transfusions are now accepted.

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Fantastic words on what brings meaning to life by the great humanist playwright, Lorraine Hansberry, the first black woman to have a play on Broadway. Her most famous play 'A Raisin in the Sun' is, to this day, a fearless commentary on racism and the 'American dream'. #Humanistbookshelf

I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and – I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations and generations.

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The cutting words of Christopher Hitchens, perhaps the heaviest hitter of the New Atheist publishing boom of the 2000s, drawn from his bestseller God Is Not Great. Nearly fifteen years after his death, he remains one of the most read atheists of all time. #HumanistBookshelf.

‘Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it. The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.’ Christopher Hitchens

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One of the most influential voices of the American Revolution: Thomas Paine. Paine's incendiary critiques of tyranny, organised religion, slavery, and extreme inequality, have kept his work on humanist bookshelves for over two centuries. #HumanistBookshelf

‘Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.’

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Zadie Smith in her essay On Beauty, cautioning readers to focus on developing their own independent convictions, and to be wary of ideologies that claim to hold all the answers, or an ultimate meaning to life, or that spare us the work of deciding what we actually stand for. #HumanistBookshelf

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Humanists UK @humanists.uk · 19/09/2026

'There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.' The man who wrote War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells – bringing some Darwinian thought to the forefront of his other brilliant science fiction novel The Time Machine. #HumanistBookshelf. 🧵

‘It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers.’

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Wole Soyinka, the first Black African winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, knows this firsthand. He was imprisoned in Nigeria for nearly two years, much of it in solitary confinement, and has spent his life defending the freedom to write. Put The Man Died on your #HumanistBookshelf.

‘Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress truth.’

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Humanists UK @humanists.uk · 19/09/2026

Nobel laureate Doris Lessing's rules for reading: browse freely, follow what attracts you, drop what bores you, and never read out of duty or to keep up with a trend. A book that bores you at twenty may open doors at fifty. #HumanistBookshelf

‘There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.’

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Few humanist authors are as well known as Salman Rushdie, who in 1989 was sentenced to death by a fatwa issued by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini over his novel The Satanic Verses, and in 2022 was stabbed on stage at a lecture in New York. He is our patron, and one of our heroes. #Humanistbookshelf

‘Nobody has the right to not be offended...If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people. I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.’

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In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft made a radical claim: women are rational beings, and education, not nature, is what held them back. She argued for reason and human dignity, challenging custom and religious justifications used to surpress women. She's been on our #humanistbookshelf ever since.

‘I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists. I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings are only the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.’

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There are books that change lives. And there are books that change the world. Few have changed our understanding of the world as profoundly as On the Origin of Species. So, here are perhaps some of the most important words ever written. #HumanistBookshelf. humanists.uk/humanistbook...

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

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Really great recommendations! #HumanistBookshelf. Get yours in now. Sagan is certainly in the lead as our most recommended author at the moment. Also, just for fun, here's one of our favourite Douglas Adams quotes.

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful. Without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? Douglas Adams. Author and humanist.

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'By the time I finished it, I knew I'd left that faith behind.' Writing in the Guardian, our Vice President Alice Roberts on the book that ended her faith – Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker – and on becoming a humanist long before she knew the word for it. @profaliceroberts.bsky.social

When i picked up Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker. I was already beginning to seriously doubt the Anglican faith i'd been brought up in. By the time i finished it, I knew I'd left that faith behinds. biological diversity could be entirely explained through natural processes; there was no need - and no evidence of - a divine creator. I became a humanist although I didn't know the word for it back then.

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What a book. What a quote! 'Clutching crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.' Carl Sagan. #HumanistBookshelf

"Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world. This book is a personal statement, reflecting my lifelong love affair with science. But there's another reason: science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of content in our enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less**)**, lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations of pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance

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Asked in the Commons this week whether it's acceptable for a school to require young girls to wear a hijab as part of their uniform, the Education Secretary answered: 'No.' She's right. Every child has their own right to freedom of religion or belief – and no school should take it from them.

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On 5 September, hundreds of men in balaclavas blockaded Dover. The next day, Portsmouth. As they did it, they chanted 'Christ is King'. Their leader says the tactics came from paramilitary-style groups in Northern Ireland. It is funded through an American Christian crowdfunding site.

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Janet is the first Blue Peter presenter to take up the Humanists UK Presidency – and she's doing a marvellous job of it. She joins a long line of broadcasters who've held the role, including Claire Rayner, Polly Toynbee, George Melly, Linda Smith, Alice Roberts, and Jim Al-Khalili, to name a few.

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Here's one we made earlier. For so many of us, you were a kind and compassionate voice we grew up hearing. We're so glad you've chosen to continue that legacy with us today, supporting our work for a kinder, more tolerant society. Happy Birthday!

'Whether it's how we teach our children, how we celebrate love, or how we treat each other at the end of life, there's no one way of thinking, just a shared understanding that this is the only life we have. So what we do with it matters. Which is slightly terrifying, but also rather brilliant. That means today matters. This moment matters. This moment matters. And if you feel like this, maybe you're closer to humanism than you think. Janet Ellis MBE Humanists UK

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