Secular Humanist Freethinker Pansy Sticker Pack

Show off these stickers to honor the global legacy of independent thinkers who believed that human reason should be as free and hardy as a wild flower.

Pansies were first cultivated around 1812 from wildflowers called viola tricolor. The word comes from the French pensée — meaning thought. To wear a pansy was to signal that you were a thinker, that your conclusions were your own.

The pansy became the freethought emblem. By the 1880s, freethinkers across France, Belgium, Spain, and Sweden were wearing it openly. An American Secular Union pamphlet from around 1890 called on every freethinker to wear it as “a silent and unobtrusive testimony of his principles.”

 At the 1920 International Freethinker Congress in Prague, Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner noted that the streets were full of people wearing the Congress badge alongside the pansy — openly, proudly, in public.

The pansy represents the commitment to think, and to let others do the same.

Sticker pack includes two pansy stickers, both are purple and yellow with the classic pansy face — the kind that looks like it’s thinking something important.

This color combo was most likely worn as a badge at the 1920 International Freethinker Congress in Prague.

One sticker has a banner that reads Freethinker. The second sticker has a banner that reads Deeds Not Creeds.

Both stickers are illustrated from photographs, gloss vinyl, and sized at about 2.5 by 2 inches — just right for a water bottle, laptop, or phone case. The kind of small thing that starts a conversation.

Features authentic article from The Freethinker: The Flower of Freethought.