Traditional humanism emphasized equal rights for all human beings, and consequently the similarity of human beings. Recently it has been pointed out that postmodernism, which can be considered as a modern humanism, focuses on the diversity of mankind. In this paper it is claimed that these two aspects – sameness and diversity of human beings – are both essential to humanism. The history of linguistics, which is closely correlated with the history of humanism, demonstrates that the focus has constantly shifted between uniformity (universality) and diversity.