Secular Quotes

In our world, in which religious images are losing their meaning, in which our customs are getting more and more secular, we are losing our sense of the eternal. I think it's a loss that has done a great deal of damage to modern art. Painting is a return to origins. (Antoni Tàpies)
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. View quote
George Steiner
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. View quote
Hannah Arendt
The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion. View quote
Ulrich Beck
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. View quote
Umberto Eco
The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves. View quote
M. H. Abrams
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. View quote
Ron Paul
To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction. View quote
Joseph Addison
The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths. View quote
Christopher Hitchens
If forgers and malefactors are put to death by the secular power, there is much more reason for excommunicating and even putting to death one convicted of heresy. View quote
Thomas Aquinas
In classical Arabic and in the other classical languages of Islam there are no pairs of terms corresponding to lay and ecclesiastical, spiritual and temporal, secular and religious, because these pairs of words express a Christian dichotomy which has no equivalent in the world of Islam. (Bernard Lewis)
More people need to understand the games secular liberals play. Here's one rule-of-thumb: No matter how bad a story sounds - particularly if it sounds bad - recognize the pattern of defamation. View quote
Marvin Olasky
Music [is] a science peculiarly productive of a pleasure that no state of life, publick or private, secular or sacred; no difference of age or season; no temper of mind or condition of health exempt from present anguish; nor, lastly, distinction of quality, renders either improper, untimely, or unentertaining. View quote
Samuel Pepys
If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature-the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society-it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there. View quote
Susan Sontag
Bosnia should be a secular state. A non-secular Bosnia would be terror. View quote
Alija Izetbegović
Absolutists frighten me. During all the endless discussions on my blog about evolution, intelligent design, God, and the afterworld, numbering altogether thousands of comments, I have never named my beliefs, although readers have freely informed me that I am an atheist, and agnostic, or at the very least a secular humanist. View quote
Roger Ebert
Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance. View quote
Sam Harris
God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. ... and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. ... From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person. View quote
Salman Rushdie
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. View quote
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
As the dominant social ethic changed from a religious to a secular one, the problem of heresy disappeared, and the problem of madness arose and became of great social significance. In the next chapter I shall examine the creation of social deviants, and shall show that as formerly priests had manufactured heretics, so physicians, as the new guardians of social conduct and morality, began to manufacture madmen. View quote
Thomas Szasz
Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish. (James Joyce)
Nietzsche's ideas and plans: for example, the idea of giving up the whole wretched academic world to form a secular monastic community. View quote
Karl Jaspers
Whoever desires to live among men has to obey their laws-this is what the secular morality of Western civilization comes down to. ... Rationality in the form of such obedience swallows up everything, even the freedom to think. View quote
Max Horkheimer
The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists. View quote
John Maynard Keynes
I believe my nation is truly secular, I truly believe that. View quote
Shahrukh Khan