Secular Quotes

#1. Men were better, or more timid. Secular and religious education had effaced the throat-grappling instinct, or else firm finance held in check the passions.

Stephen Crane

#2. Academics and scientists too easily enjoy the role of secular priesthood given them in the nineteenth century by T. H. Huxley in particular.

Simon James

#3. I believe that if Israel were to put an end to the settlements in the West Bank tomorrow, as it did in Gaza, there would still be reluctance on the part of the Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish secular democracy.

Alan Dershowitz

#4. Nothing could assuage the secular grief that was your heritage.

Aldous Huxley

#5. It is a war of light vs. darkness, of Christ vs. antichrist, the Word of God vs. secular humanism. There will be a winner and a loser!.. There is no compromise with the enemy. There is no neutrality in this war!

John Hagee

#6. We ought so to behave to one another as to avoid making enemies of our friends, and at the same time to make friends of our enemies.

Pythagoras

#7. A church determined to hold only those doctrines that a secular world finds adequately comprehensible is a church that will hold to no central vital Christian teaching whatsoever.

Albert Mohler

#8. If we are going to save America and evangelize the world, we cannot accommodate secular philosophies that are diametrically opposed to Christian truth.

Jerry Falwell

#9. The truth is that solitude is the creative condition of genius, religious or secular, and the ultimate sterilising of it. No human soul can long ignore "the giant agony of the world" and live, except indeed the mollusc life, a barnacle upon eternity.

Helen Waddell

#10. Our purpose is to produce students who have that rare and precious combination of a superb secular education, complemented by faith in the Lord, a knowledge of the doctrines He has revealed, and a testimony that they are true.

Boyd K. Packer

#11. How can there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age worshipers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy money changers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers, and homosexuals are on top?

Pat Robertson

#12. Destruction, best expressed in this age in which I write as terrorism, is truly there for its own sake, but the pretense of religion or secular patriotism converts the destructive into the speciously creative.

Anthony Burgess

#13. The imminent demise of the church has been predicted since the middle of the 18th century. This is the regular secular mantra if churchgoing declines. I could take you to plenty of churches that are full to bursting and new churches being built.

N. T. Wright

#14. I'd like the United States to become what it was always meant to be, which is a secular nation - more publicly committed to reason, to improving understanding, and promoting education.

Matthew Stewart

#15. Whether you're an opera singer, a legislator or customer service operator, there is a way that we can find common ground with our audience - be they young or old, Democrats or Republicans, rich or poor, religious or secular.

Charity Sunshine Tillemann-Dick

#16. Public education grants secular worldviews an exclusive monopoly in the classroom.

Nancy Pearcey

#17. It was from Buber's other writings that I learned what could also be found in I and Thou: the central commandment to make the secular sacred.

Martin Buber

#18. Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove. It is no surprise that political revolutions, scepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together,

Carl Sagan

#19. Our poor world aspires simply to point out where Christians have gone wrong, and that is pretty much where it goes wrong. It is as though many of us, when of the world, are actually all the more judgmental: for we are stuck on a bad Christian while the Christian is pinned to a good Christ.

Criss Jami

#20. The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle - secular, humanist, or religious - says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not?

Nathan Myhrvold

#21. I grew up in a secular suburban Jewish household where we only observed the religion on very specific times like a funeral or a Bar Mitzvah.

Jesse Eisenberg

#22. I was glad that our venerable, almost formless religions, drained of all intransigence and purged of savage rites, linked us mysteriously to the most ancient secrets of man and of earth, not forbidding us, however, a secular explanation of facts and a rational view of human conduct.

Marguerite Yourcenar

#23. The ultimate goal of the anti-religious elites is to transform America into a completely secular nation, a nation that is legally and culturally biased against Christianity.

Ron Paul

#24. I love reading religious authors. Especially in the sort of circle I move in, people tend to be more secular, and I love reading books by just really smart people of religious faith. It's always a really cool perspective.

Mallory Ortberg

#25. If once in America the question of religious toleration was raised in defense of nonbelievers who dissented from religious orthodoxy, today it is raised by believers who feel excluded from a predominantly secular public world.

Alan Wolfe

#26. Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Salman Rushdie

#27. In Western lands there is a distinct division between the religious and the secular life. There is one rule of conduct for laymen and another for clergymen. This distinction has never found its place in the life of the people of India. There, all of life is included in the word 'religion.'

Virchand Gandhi

#28. Whether we "spiritualize" our life or "secularize" our religion, whether we invite men to a spiritual banquet or simply join them at the secular one, the real life of the world, for which we are told God gave his only begotten Son, remains hopelessly beyond our religious grasp.

Alexander Schmemann

#29. The process of driving a wedge between sacred and secular history is called secularization...the eventual result of this process is that belief in God is relegated to nothing more than a "personal belief" that has no standing in public discourse.

Stephen Leston

#30. Some of those drawn into the holy war had been secular nationalists only a few years before. If one looks at the biographies of these people, remarkable continuities are revealed.

Jurgen Habermas

#31. The writer, like a priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His work needs a frolic health; he must be at the top of his condition.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#32. To say that secular means irreligious implies that all the arts and sciences are irreligious, and is very like saying that all professions except that of the law are illegal.

John Stuart Mill

#33. She [Hillary Clinton] is the epitome of the progressive - the secular progressive movement. And she counts on the fact that people are uninformed, the Alinsky Model, taking advantage of useful idiots.

Benjamin Carson

#34. It is our homes and families that need reforming in this increasingly materialistic and secular world.

M. Russell Ballard

#35. In a secular democracy, a person is supposed to be punished only when he breaks the law; never because he is evil. That is, after all, what distinguishes a democracy from a theocracy.

Thomas Szasz

#36. With our goddess, the Pachamama, and it is not possible to continue having a monopoly of religious faith, only Catholic. We have therefore adopted the new constitution as a secular state where all religious beliefs will be respected.

Evo Morales

#37. My parents were secular. I am an atheist.

Ben Elton

#38. Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish - separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two.

Barbara Brown Taylor

#39. How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.

Yann Martel

#40. Doing something because God has said to do it does not make a person moral: it merely tells us that person is a prudential believer, akin to the person who obeys the command of an all-powerful secular king.

Alan Dershowitz

#41. News in printed form is in secular decline. However, news delivered the way consumers want it is growing and thriving.

Gracia Martore

#42. It was, however, in the interest of Osama bin Laden for us to destroy a secular Arab leader; it was very much in the interest of the Iranians because they wanted revenge against Saddam Hussein for Iraq's invasion in 1980.

William Odom

#43. I can't imagine a secular life, a spiritual life, an intellectual life, a physical life. I mean, we would be completely wrought with schizophrenia, wouldn't we?

Terry Tempest Williams

#44. If we weren't born with anti-social passions - narcissism, envy, lust, meanness, greed, hunger for power, just to name the more obvious - why the need for so many laws, whether religious or secular, that govern behavior?

Dennis Prager

#45. Your children will go to public school and they will be trained for somewhere around 15,000 hours in ungodly secular thought. And then they'll go to Sunday school and they'll color a picture of Noah's ark. And you think that's going to stand against the lies that they are being told?

Paul Washer

#46. The demand that Islam makes of women is to not attract attention to yourself, and if you are in a secular society, that attire does exactly that, and it is a political symbol, no longer religious.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#47. We can only talk to those who opt for the sovereign, territorially integral, secular, multiethnic and multi-confessional Syria.

Sergei Lavrov

#48. We have to frankly break the back of the secular-socialist machine, elect people committed to representing the American people, and then methodically rip the system apart.

Newt Gingrich

#49. As a champion of the Church Militant in a hostile secular society, Belloc would sometimes exhibit a siege mentality akin to the defiance of Pius IX.

Joseph Pearce

#50. Ultimately, culture, secular and otherwise, is a collection of survival strategies. The things that look like decoration - poetry, novels, music, dancing - if you strip away all the layers, are mechanisms for coping, surviving, understanding.

Ben Fountain

#51. We weren't allowed to have secular music in the house growing up. I was home-schooled, and gospel was the only choice we had.

John Legend

#52. The price of gold was fixed at $35 an ounce in 1934, but by the time the U.S. got through the Korean War, the Vietnam war, with all the associated secular inflation, the price level had gone up nearly three times.

Robert Mundell

#53. The secular world looks to the church and to its chagrin, finds no love, no life, no laughter, no hope and no happiness.

Rod Parsley

#54. A biblically based worldview is capable of affirming the best insights of secular philosophies without ever falling into reductionism.

Nancy Pearcey

#55. I was raised with no religious training or influence. Except the influence was to be a moral and ethical person at the secular level. And to be a peace marcher, an activist for civil rights, peace and justice.

Anne Lamott

#56. I decided to take God and organized religion seriously, and to reject the secular life which in my teens had looked attractive because it allowed me to act in any way that I wanted.

Luke Ford

#57. When Sunday loses its fundamental meaning and becomes subordinate to a secular concept of weekend dominated by such things as entertainment and sport, people stay locked within a horizon so narrow that they can no longer see the heavens.

Pope John Paul II

#58. The world is heading for another major crisis that is being called, even by the secular world, Armageddon.

Billy Graham

#59. Only in a secular history where men and women are freed for unexpected true humanity can God reveal his own being.

Edward Schillebeeckx

#60. The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.

Salman Rushdie

#61. The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.

Hannah Arendt

#62. Secular self-assertion, perhaps inevitably, developed more slowly; it was one thing to act in 'unfeminine' ways if divinely inspired, not quite so easy to act unconventionally out of personal ambition.

Margaret Walters

#63. In college, [Christian students] are assaulted by secular relativism, and if we don't prepare them, they will be like lambs led to slaughter.

Charles Colson

#64. I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.

Kurt Vonnegut

#65. The secular, for all its goodness, does not defend itself very well against mindless and perpetual consumption. It cries out to be offered by abstinence as well as use; to be appreciated, not simply absorbed. Hunger remains the best sauce.

Robert Farrar Capon

#66. But for all its benefits in offering moral guidance and meaning in life, in today's secular world religion alone is no longer adequate as a basis for ethics.

Dalai Lama XIV

#67. The present educational establishment, to cite just one group, has been obscuring the past so that our children have no way of comparing the facts of history with the distorted version promoted by biased secular historians.

Gary DeMar

#68. Still, there is space for this secular movement that has become frustrated with the liberal experience. In my opinion, there is a need for an effort that helps he establishment of social justice while taking into consideration all the qualifications and reservations against the welfare state.

Samir Kassir

#69. Superficial parallels were drawn between the Church and the Nazi Party, with its emphasis on active involvement by every member. The women's auxiliary of the Party and the Hitler Youth were regarded by some as secular equivalents to the Church's Relief Society, MIA, and the Scouting programs.

Fawn M. Brodie

#70. I now attend non-orthodox synagogues, and study little during the secular week.

Luke Ford

#71. secular people don't believe in life after death, but rather, they believe in life before death.

Phil Zuckerman

#72. Music is either sacred or secular. The sacred agrees with its dignity, and here has its greatest effect on life, an effect that remains the same through all ages and epochs. Secular music should be cheerful throughout.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#73. What Alpha offers, and what is attracting thousands of people, is permission, rare in secular culture, to discuss the big questions - life and death and their meaning.

Madeleine Bunting

#74. The U.S. spent billions of dollars to build a secular, professional national Iraqi army but failed because, despite all the U.S.-supplied guns, tanks and planes, the Iraqi military fell apart when challenged by a band of terrorists.

Richard Engel

#75. The road to the sacred leads through the secular.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

#76. Taxonomically, my family is Freethinker (including atheists, skeptics, agnostics); my genus is Humanist (including the religion-based), and my species is Secular.

John Rafferty

#77. The conflict between secular Zionism and the settler movement did not appear overnight following Israel's conquests in the 1967 war, for there was an argument that bridged the gap: security.

Elliott Abrams

#78. My fear, which I shared with everyone in the Turkish secular bourgeoisie, was not of God but of the fury of those who believed in Her too much.

Orhan Pamuk

#79. More recently, as faith gave way to materialism, anti-Semitism assumed a secular mode, harnessing itself to the dominant ideologies of both the Left and the Right.

Jack Schwartz

#80. Our concern for victims is the secular mask of Christian love.

Rene Girard

#81. Yet much remains To conquer still; peace hath her victories No less renowned then war, new foes arise Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains: Help us to save free conscience from the paw Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw.

John Milton

#82. Although the Nasser revolution of 1952 was secular, the culture remained deeply religious - but it was a faith of moderation and tolerance. Women made up nearly half my class at university, and my senior academic adviser there was a woman. In Alexandria, my friends were Christians and Muslims.

Ahmed Zewail

#83. I think that the practice of religion allows one to discover emotional and psychological truth of a kind not available in the secular world.

Jay Parini

#84. 'Snow' is my most popular book in the United States. But in Turkey, it was not as popular as 'My Name is Red,' or even 'The Museum of Innocence,' because the secular leaders didn't want this bourgeois Orhan trying to understand these head-scarf girls.

Orhan Pamuk

#85. We are all priests before God, there is no such distinction as 'secular or sacred.' In fact, the opposite of sacred is not secular; the opposite of sacred is profane. In short, no follower of Christ does secular work. We all have a sacred calling.

Ravi Zacharias

#86. My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular level.

Michael H. Hart

#87. Strength in peace. Strength in love. Always.

Janice Anderson

#88. Sometimes I think the environment in which we operate is entirely too secular. The fact that we have freedom of religion doesn't mean we need to try to have freedom from religion

William J. Clinton

#89. I think I'm fascinated by the power of religion in our culture. Like a lot of secular, liberal people, I ignored it for a long time. Lately, of course, just from a political perspective, it's impossible to ignore.

Tom Perrotta

#90. When secular figures are turned into divinities, they way they are in Peian Yang or Stanford University - that I don't like.

Noam Chomsky

#91. The Christian Mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness unmatched in Christian History.

Harry Blamires

#92. There are people in our world today and unfortunately in our political system, they do not believe in evil. They have the modern, western, secular mind set. They don't believe evil exists. They are exactly the ones who are in danger of getting blindsided by evil. Because they're not prepared for it.

Joel C. Rosenberg

#93. The Southern Baptist Church is a specific culture in itself. So, I had to study, talk to people, watch tape and go to performances to see how Gospel artists move compared to secular artists.

Boris Kodjoe

#94. Modernity has been largely shaped for Jews by three momentous experiences: the acquisition of citizenship by individual Jews in secular nation-states, the destruction of one-third of Jewry in the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel.

David Novak

#95. The dominant ethos of the twenty-first century consists of an intermingling of the sacred and the secular.

Harvey Cox

#96. On free commerce, open communication, shared knowledge, secular politics, religious coexistence, international law, and diplomatic immunity.

Jack Weatherford

#97. There is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us.

Newt Gingrich

#98. No secular state ever existed and none would exist until the end of the French Revolution, and so we understand that America was built on the Judeo-Christian ethic and we believe that this nominee is going to see to it that those truths are upheld.

Rod Parsley

#99. We should give chaos pride of place once a year or so, designating occasions on which we can be briefly exempted from the two greatest pressures of secular adult life: having to be rational and having to be faithful.

Alain De Botton

#100. Persecution may wear an insulting face. Insults may come as a result of a Christian's lifestyle, which should be different from that of the secular world.

Billy Graham