Top 100 Secular Quotes
#1. Whether it is Paul defending Judaism, Augustine pursing philosophical learnedness, Luther attempting complete ritual self-abasement, each finally realized he had given himself to secular forms of self-salvation and to a world filled with human achievement but empty of God.
William Dean
#2. The Catholic teaching against murder, for example, is largely the same as our secular laws. But as a law, it obviously has a secular rationale at least as strong as its religious rationale.
Mario Cuomo
#3. Truly barren is a secular education. It is always in labor, but never gives birth.
Gregory Of Nyssa
#4. All people, even secular people, are seeing books on the market like The End of History.
Tim LaHaye
#5. For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.
Andre Dubus
#6. Age and use do not make a style obsolete in the church as they do in secular entertainment; rather, they consecrate it.
Claude V. Palisca
#7. Just now we happen to be living in a secular age. Our thought habits are those of the scientist, not those of the worshipper. We are more likely to explain than to adore. "It thundered," we exclaim, and go our earthly way.
A.W. Tozer
#8. Secular conservatism is like trying to use your pocket handkerchief to slow you down after the main chute has failed. This is why individual heart transformation, not legislation, is fundamental to national reformation. The person and work of Jesus is not optional.
Douglas Wilson
#9. For democrats, it's as crucial to defend secular culture as to preserve secular law. And in fact the two projects are inseparable: When religion defines morality, the wall between church and state comes to be seen as immoral.
Ellen Willis
#10. The Salafists are trying to abort the revolution and make it religious, though the revolution started secular. There was not a single Islamic slogan. It was secular men and women, and in fact, they were unified. Now they want to divide the revolution, and religion is a very strong weapon.
Nawal El Saadawi
#11. I see little difference in the attitudes of those who consider themselves Christian and those who are openly secular and agnostic. Most Christian citizenship appears to be clearly right here - on this little bit of very unreal estate.
Richard Rohr
#12. The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge.
Lionel Blue
#13. Luther says that vocations are a mask from God. That is, God hides Himself in the workplace, the family, the Church, and the seemingly secular society
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
#14. When 'Christians' cite the Bible as the basis for secular policies, they must explain why they believe Muslims in the Middle East are evil for doing the same with the Koran.
Kurt Eichenwald
#15. The most efficacious secular book that ever was published in America is the newspaper.
Henry Ward Beecher
#16. The focus of my research is how secular movements originated in West Asian countries and subsequently changed to pan-Islamic movements. The role of Western countries in this aspect is also a part of the research.
Taslima Nasrin
#17. Secular humanism proposes ... the complete implementation of the agenda of modernism ... what is necessary for it to occur is a ... New Enlightenment.
Paul Kurtz
#18. In our hyper-secular world, worship is still inevitable. But it is vital to remember that our gods don't choose us, we choose them.
John Green
#19. One of the features of a democracy is the disentanglement of the sacred from the secular because in religiously pluralistic countries, no one can legitimately claim special status by faith membership.
Michael Shermer
#20. If there is a secular equivalent of standing in a great spired Cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystic light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be watching children in their little bedrooms fast asleep. Girls especially.
Don DeLillo
#21. The concept of neutrality can lead to a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular and a passive, or even active, hostility to the religious. Such results are not only not compelled by the Constitution, but, it seems to me, are prohibited by it.
Arthur Goldberg
#22. Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position, back to center stage.
Karen Armstrong
#23. Secular music was not allowed in our household.
Paul Brandt
#24. The real enemy is the secular humanist mindset which seeks to destroy everything that is good in this society.
Paul Weyrich
#25. Our fathers founded the first secular government that was ever founded in this world. Recollect that. The first secular government - the first government that said every church has exactly the same rights and no more; every religion has the same rights, and no more.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#26. Church doctrine has no place in secular law. You can't take away people's rights to meet your own religious criteria.
Marie Sexton
#27. A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
Umberto Eco
#28. In the end we have one choice: to suffer well or suffer badly, to reach for or to reject that quality which is termed, equally, by both religious and secular, grace.
Anna Lyndsey
#29. Moral capitalism is possible; if not, its strictures are only a kind of misleading vanity, the rhetoric of a secular piety.
Stephen Young
#30. Why is it that aggression in the name of God shocks secular liberal sensibilities, whereas the act of killing in the name of the secular nation, or of democracy, does not?
Talal Asad
#31. Not even the most secular among us can fail to be uplifted by Christianity's architectural legacy - the great cathedrals. These immense and glorious buildings were erected in an era of constricted horizons, both in time and in space.
Martin Rees
#32. As high as mind stands above nature, so high does the state stand above physical life. Man must therefore venerate the state as a secular deity. The march of God in the world, that is what the State is.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#33. Jesus didn't debase the holy into the secular; He infused the secular with the holy.
Eugene H. Peterson
#34. There's a group of people - maybe the secular Taliban is a good name for them - who have morphed this idea, that you have to accept my values being every bit as cherished as your values. That's not tolerance ... There are too many things in this world which we sit back and tolerate.
Foster Friess
#35. Anti-Christian ideology has permeated much of the secular news media, and so often Biblical Christians are mocked, misrepresented or attacked for what they believe by anti-Christian agenda driven reporters.
Ken Ham
#36. I had always thought of Egypt as a rather secular country. And I think it is, but people are quite observant of the strictures of Ramadan.
P. J. O'Rourke
#37. Every fundamentalist movement I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion.
Karen Armstrong
#38. I don't see life divided into public and private, secular and sacred. It's all an open place of service before our God.
Charles R. Swindoll
#39. The distinction between the religious and secular orders is a fundamental aspect of Christianity. This distinction is an innovation compared to Islam and Judaism, and it is an advantage that has helped shape Europe.
Walter Kasper
#40. So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.
E. O. Wilson
#41. How deep is the weatherfront of time
that advances, roaring and calm
unendingly between was and will be?
A millisecond? A few hours? All secular life
worldwide, all consequences of past life
travel in it.
(from 'The Welter')
Les Murray
#42. Most forms of Protestantism are inherently secular, at least at the ideological level, due to their compartmentalization of faith from works, of church from state, of grace from an incarnational manifestation of sanctity.
Gregory C. Dilsaver
#43. I teach in the Divinity School at Duke University, a very secular university. But before Duke, I taught fourteen years at the University of Notre Dame.
Stanley Hauerwas
#44. The future will be no primrose path. It will have its own problems. Some will be the secular problems of the past, giant flowers of evil blossoming at last to their own destruction. Others will be wholly new.
John B. S. Haldane
#45. In the secular view, suffering is never seen as a meaningful part of life but only as an interruption.
Timothy Keller
#46. what secular avocation on earth was there for a young man (whose friends could not get him an 'appointment') which was at once gentlemanly, lucrative, and to be followed without special knowledge?
George Eliot
#47. Modern colonialism won its great victories not so much through its military and technological prowess as through its ability to create secular hierarchies incompatible with the traditional order.
Ashis Nandy
#48. In a world divided by differences of nationality, race, colour, religion and wealth [the rule of law] is one of the greatest unifying factors, perhaps the greatest, the nearest we are likely to approach to a universal secular religion.
Tom Bingham
#49. We can either emphasize those aspects of our traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicion or work with those that stress the interdependence and equality of all human beings. The choice is yours. (22)
Karen Armstrong
#50. Because secular scientists assume the solar system is billions of years old, they believe they are free to extrapolate these motions backward hundreds of thousands of years into the supposed "prehistoric" past.
Anonymous
#51. The crimes of religion pale in comparison to those of secular regimes. This doesn't justify wrongs done in the name of Christianity, but it does undermine unchecked enthusiasm for a godless utopia.
Scott Klusendorf
#52. The recognition of a distinct 'national identity' among members of the Body of Christ can keep before us our ties with Christians who live under different secular governments, with whom we have bonds that transcend and override our commitments to governments and groups outside the church.
Richard J. Mouw
#53. Saddam Hussein was not an Islamist. He's not a radical jihadist. He's not a radical Muslim. I mean, he was a - he was a Baathist. He was a secular - even though he professed to be a good and devout Muslim.
Rick Santorum
#54. Politics in America is the binding secular religion.
Theodore White
#55. Truth is not obtained cheaply. It demands much time given to prayer and study of the Scriptures, followed by practical application in our daily lives. It must take priority over the many forms of cheap entertainment offered by our secular culture. It is a lifetime commitment.
Derek Prince
#56. Nietzsche's ideas and plans: for example, the idea of giving up the whole wretched academic world to form a secular monastic community.
Karl Jaspers
#57. I sometimes think that Thomas Cook should be numbered among the secular saints. He took travel from the privileged and gave it to the people.
Robert Runcie
#58. Secular journalists ... tend to accept uncritically the oft - repeated Evangelical Protestant and Conservative Roman Catholic definitions that the Bible is anti - gay. If these people were honest, they would have to admit that the Bible is also pro - slavery and anti - women.
John Shelby Spong
#59. In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world.
Angela Carter
#60. What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.
Robert Pape
#61. I put all the blame legally and morally on the actions of the terrorist, but America's secular and anti-Christian environment left us open to our Lord's decision not to protect. When a nation deserts God and expels God from the culture ... the result is not good.
Jerry Falwell
#62. When Jews left Judaism, they didn't stop being religious. They simply swapped God-based Judaism for godless secular humanism and leftism. For left-wing Jews, Judaism is their ethnicity; leftism is their religion.
Dennis Prager
#63. I am not offering God as a theory to compete with scientific theories about the universe. Rather I am saying that those self-contained, secular theories provide evidence for theologically neutral premises in philosophical arguments leading to a conclusion that has theistic significance.
William Lane Craig
#64. Since the end of the Cold War, metropolitan elites everywhere have identified progress and modernity with the cornucopia of global capitalism, the consolidation of liberal democratic regimes and the secular ethic of consumerism.
Pankaj Mishra
#65. Hitler emphasized again and again his belief that Nazism was a secular ideology founded on modern science. Science, he declared, would easily destroy the last remaining vestiges of superstition. 'Put a small telescope in a village, and you destroy a world of superstitions.'24
Richard J. Evans
#66. We need to agree on common values for all religions as soon as possible, a kind of secular Ten Commandments on which we will build the world of tomorrow.
Lech Walesa
#67. The modern secular state's capacity for barbarism exceeds any of the evils for which Christendom might justly be indicted, not
David Bentley Hart
#68. Scholars of religion refer to the current metamorphosis in religiousness with phrases like the "move to horizontal transcendence" or the "turn to the immanent." But it would be more accurate to think of it as the rediscovery of the sacred in the immanent, the spiritual within the secular.
Harvey Cox
#69. Nepal will be a secular state - there is no other way.
Sushil Koirala
#70. Secular music, do you say, belongs to the devil? Does it? Well, if it did I would plunder him for it, for he has no right to a single note of the whole seven. Every note, and every strain, and every harmony is divine, and belongs to us.
William Booth
#71. The secular university is scandalized by the claims of revelation. Those who have, for whatever historical reasons, become seekers-on-principle, cannot tolerate the allegation that truth is a gift. To have to receive offends those who have determined to take.
Louis Mackey
#72. You learn in America to speak two ways. You learn in public discourse not to be very specific about your religious life. Or, if we talk about it, we'll find a secular way of doing it that will not be offensive to people of non-belief. So, that you go through life with these alternate voices.
Richard Rodriguez
#73. Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.
George Steiner
#74. truly believe this child to be the new king. A furious Herod summons his religious advisers. As a secular
Bill O'Reilly
#75. I was raised on gospel. I remember hip-hop and rock music were secular, so basically, for my first ten years living in Detroit, I was on gospel. But when I moved to Houston, that's when I got to open up my musical horizons.
Lizzo
#76. Secular artists see themselves with performance; they are more self involved, presentational.
Boris Kodjoe
#77. Many pastors have been reduced to secular "mentors" and "coaches" in exchange for authentic disciplers of men.
John Paul Warren
#78. I believe in freedom, I'm for a world without borders. But that's an ideal. On a practical level, I'm for a secular state where religion only plays a minor role.
Shahin Najafi
#79. London the secular city instructs him: turn any corner and he can find himself inside a parable.
Thomas Pynchon
#80. In fact, even Tillich's socialism was accommodationist because it continued the Constantinian strategy: The way to make the church radical is by identifying the church with secular "radicals", that is, socialists.
Stanley Hauerwas
#81. An Islamist is a Muslim who seeks to impose Shariah on others, including many 'cultural' or secular Muslims.
Dennis Prager
#82. People in the secular world have too much to live with, too little to live for.
Os Guinness
#83. I've received a lot of positive feedback from both the secular and Christian markets. People seem to be receiving it with open arms and hearts, and are interested in the stories I want to share about my relationship with God and my faith.
Brian Littrell
#84. To me music is music. A person of faith, a person that calls themselves a Christian, they are the Christian and they make music. Some music has more to do about God than other music, but in reality what makes the difference between "secular" and "Christian" music is simply a marketing channel.
Michael Gungor
#85. Sweden is an open, liberal, secular and democratic country. We strive towards achieving equality; we are forward-looking and refuse to be pulled back by social constructs such as religion.
Bjorn Ulvaeus
#86. Traditionally, open-minded secular liberal rationalists have not made a case for tolerance.
Maajid Nawaz
#87. The public school has become the established church of secular society.
Ivan Illich
#88. Have we come to the point where it is now considered a secular blasphemy to acknowledge the name of God at all?
William Bennett
#90. The secular world often finds its constituents disenfranchised and solitary as it has spent a great deal of time debating the religious community while failing to build a true community of its own.
Chris Matakas
#91. I think the most important factor moving us toward a secular society has been the educational factor. Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is sixteen tends toward the elimination of religious superstition.
Paul Blanshard
#92. If you create enough space in Egypt, civil society will revive itself, and then will you have all of these secular forces, liberals, nationalists and others, compete with the Islamists. And then you will see the Islamists reduced to their size.
Hisham Melhem
#93. Jordan is a very secular, Westernized country in some respects.
Kathryn Bigelow
#94. The available divorce data show that marital breakdown is now considerably more common in the Bible Belt than in the secular Northeast ... The percentages of broken families and unwed mothers remained higher in places like Arkansas and Oklahoma than in New York and Massachusetts.
Joe Conason
#95. When men in secular life, who might be religious or not, see women being treated as secondary in the eyes of God, they assume that it's OK for them to do it.
Jimmy Carter
#96. John Paul was the first modern pope to grow up in a secular culture: He attended public schools, danced with girls - indeed, as a teenager he had a crush on a beautiful Jewish girl who fled his hometown just ahead of the arrival of the Germans.
Carl Bernstein
#97. 'The Purpose-Driven Life' is not just a mega-bestselling work of Christian faith; it is the thing that every voter, secular or not, yearns for.
Eric Liu
#98. Toppling secular dictators in the Middle East has only led to chaos and the rise of radical Islam.
Rand Paul
#99. One writer may speak of something more lasting than Horace Greeley when he writes of that editor that his secular philanthropy drifted into autocratic ambition.
Harold Holzer
#100. Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith ... We need believing people.
Adolf Hitler
