Secular Quotes - page 8

It will not benefit the world if we succeed in banishing the old-fashioned wars of nations only to clear the board for social and doctrinal wars of even greater ferocity and destructiveness. This, indeed, is a growing danger. We were told that the old wars of religion had ended, but that is not much comfort if the wars of various kinds of secular religions or non-God religions are to begin and are to make Europe the arena of their hideous conflict, and if all that makes life worth living to the mass of the people is to be destroyed in the process. (Winston Churchill)
Yesterday, here in Philadelphia, at the Liberty Bell, I met a lot of Americans who do have the will. From arch-religious conservatives to young secular radicals, I just felt an incredible overpowering sense that this was possible. We're calling it the ONE campaign, to put an end to AIDS and extreme poverty in Africa. They believe we can do it, so do I. View quote
Bono
The public school has become the established church of secular society. View quote
Ivan Illich
And so, uh, uh, a wonderful book, um, American Grace by, uh, Putnam and Campbell, um, uh, is the ultimate authority on this. What they find is that, um, it doesn't matter what religion you are, and it doesn't matter what you believe, if you are part of a religious community, then on average, you're a better citizen, you give more to charity. Religion does bring out the good in people. Now, secular people can be perfectly good, too, but on average, they give less and they give less of their time. So, I'd like to think that I simply, as a secular atheist scientist, followed the evidence, and it showed me that I was wrong in thinking that religion was evil. View quote
Jonathan Haidt
Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 with the intention of destroying secular Palestinian nationalism.... OK, they did destroy the secular PLO and instead what they got was an Islamic fundamentalist movement that they couldn't control, that drove them out of most of Lebanon. What did they do next? They did exactly the same thing in the West Bank. View quote
Noam Chomsky
If forgers and other malefactors are forthwith condemned to death by the secular authorities, there is much more reason for heretics, as soon as they are convicted of heresy, to be not only excommunicated but even put to death. View quote
Thomas Aquinas
Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life. View quote
Henry van Dyke
As far as the public is concerned, India is amazingly secular. View quote
Shahrukh Khan
Our purpose is simply to ask how theological principles can be shown to have usable secular analogues that throw light upon the nature of language. View quote
Kenneth Burke
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? View quote
Dennis Prager
My position on the issue of homosexuality is no different from the position of the Anglican Church and all the major denominations around the world. I know that it's different from the secular culture in the western world, but it's no different from the teaching of the church globally. We're Christians basically. (Nicky Gumbel)
I think that when people experience something that seems to be supernatural, in some ways it cuts through the secular mindset. View quote
Nicky Gumbel
The university system in 2014, it's like the Catholic Church circa 1514... You have this priestly class of professors that doesn't do very much work; people are buying indulgences in the form of amassing enormous debt for the sort of the secular salvation that a diploma represents. And what I think is also similar to the 16th century is that the Reformation will come largely from the outside. View quote
Peter Thiel
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. View quote
Robert Mundell
Secular humanism debases the human. View quote
Sinclair B. Ferguson
Contrary to what many Westerners believe, Islam has a rich tradition of secular painting in spite of its ban on images. It is only in religious rituals that the use of pictorial representation is totally prohibited. View quote
Fatema Mernissi
The modern Muslim state has never presented itself as secular. Muslim nationalist forces, trapped by a militant and colonialist West unable to share or export its humanism, were driven to build up a rampart, to entrench themselves within the past. View quote
Fatema Mernissi
The most important secular commitment is to the truth, which is based on observation and evidence rather than on mere faith. Seculars strive not to confuse truth with belief. View quote
Yuval Noah Harari
You want to have two guys making out in front of your 4-year-old? It's OK with them. A guy smoking a joint, blowing the smoke into your little kid's face? OK with them. And I'm not exaggerating here. This is exactly what the secular movement stands for. View quote
Bill O'Reilly
We are accustomed to talking of church and state, and a whole series of pairs of words that go with them lay and ecclesiastical, secular and religious, spiritual and temporal, and so on. These pairs of words simply do not exist in classical Islamic terminology, because the dichotomy that these words express is unknown. They are used in the modern languages. In Arabic, they borrow the terminology used by Christian Arabs. They are fortunate in having a substantial Christian population using Arabic, and they therefore have a good part of the modern terminology at their disposal, in their own language. In Turkish, Persian, Urdu and other languages of Islam, they had to invent new words. View quote
Bernard Lewis
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)
I grew up in a very artistic, cultured home, but without any kind of spirituality. My parents were secular materialists, so I saw art as having an alternate value. View quote
Daniel Pinchbeck
I think that the practice of religion allows one to discover emotional and psychological truth of a kind not available in the secular world. View quote
Jay Parini
My parents were born into a secular country. They met in Turkey's top medical school, moved to America in the nineteen-seventies, and became researchers and professors. View quote
Elif Batuman
But when we reduce sex to a function, we also invoke the idea of dysfunction. We are no longer talking about the art of sex; rather, we are talking about the mechanics of sex. Science has replaced religion as the authority; and science is a more formidable arbiter. Medicine knows how to scare even those who scoff at religion. Compared with a diagnosis, what's a mere sin? We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt. View quote
Esther Perel