Top 171 Secular Quotes

I spend much of my time in a broadly liberal secular world but I don’t belong to it, I belong somewhere else.

The ‘Ramayana’ explores the limits of secular freedom and the limits of religion.

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.

I had been taught that the separation between religion and politics happened in the Enlightenment. But there were people who tried to create a secular relationship to government 2,000 years ago, and those people were the Jews.

Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What’s remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?

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.

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.

If one wishes to forgo the protection afforded by secular pluralism, then perhaps Western liberal democracies is not the right place for you to freely exercise your religion.

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.

Back in the days when the market was a kind of secular god and all the world thrilled to behold the amazing powers of private capital, the idea of privatizing highways and airports and other bits of our transportation infrastructure made a certain kind of sense.

When I was in my early teens, I joined a cult. And we weren’t allowed to listen to secular music or anything that wasn’t made by us. So I spent a lot of time not listening to music, and by the time I could, I just didn’t get into it.

I see religion as a storehouse of lots of really good ideas that a secular world should look at, raid, and learn from.

I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.

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.

One can’t understand the Christian Right and similar movements unless one sees them as reactive – they’re reacting to what they call secular humanism.

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.

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

Private religious speech can’t be discriminated against. It has to be treated equally with secular speech.

We have to find a way to try and reconcile our beliefs – and Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, has traditionally seen homosexuality as a sin – with the reality of life in modern, pluralistic, secular societies in which gay people cannot be wished away or banished from sight.

I’m rather secular. I’m basically Jewish. But I think I’m Jewish not because of the Jewish religion at all.

The secular elites are so terrified of telling the truth about radical Islam. When you talk about the radical Islamists, we have got to get straight and get serious and talk about it in the right way.

I felt it was a privilege that I came from such a rich background. I had the best of both worlds. My mother was a Shia Muslim, while my father was a janoi-clad man. He never pretended to be secular.

If India is not secular, then India is not India at all.

I grew up in eastern Kentucky, and we would sing in the churches, and there’s lots of good mountain church singers out there. Like a lot of folks who turn out to be secular music artists, that’s a lot of the training you put in, whether you know it or not.

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.

It is essential that Christians understand this: Every Jew – secular, religious, assimilated, left-wing, right-wing – fears being killed because he is Jewish. This is the best-kept secret about Jews, who are widely perceived as inordinately secure and powerful. But it is the only universally held sentiment among Jews.

I believe in secular politics.

I believe that the environment at home has been fairly secular and liberal. And most times, it comes from my mother. Our culture is very strong, but at the same time, she’s a very free-spirited person. She’s an artiste, and that’s the environment I grew up in, where films and music were respected and meditated upon.

The tendency of our time is wholly oriented toward the secular. The efforts of the mystics will remain episodes. Despite a deepening of our conceptions of life, we will build no cathedrals.

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.

I was born to a Hindu father and Muslim mother on Christmas day. You can’t get more secular than that.

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.

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.

Books about technology start-ups have a pattern. First, there’s the grand vision of the founders, then the heroic journey of producing new worlds from all-night coding and caffeine abuse, and finally, the grand finale: immense wealth and secular sainthood. Let’s call it the Jobs Narrative.

The Muslim world is threatened by religious fanaticism. The Western world is threatened by secular fanaticism.

Especially in a very secular world, we should always stress what is common in the Christian religion.

Strong Islamist trends make a fundamentalist Palestine more likely than a small state under a secular government.

I do believe God has given me an incredible opportunity and a platform in a secular environment but still to take a stand for Christ and being a blessing to believers.

I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. I grew up in a very Jewish neighbourhood and thought the whole world was like that. My parents were secular, but I went to a very Orthodox Jewish school, and I really got into it. I found it all fascinating, and I was just kind of really attracted to the metaphysical questions.

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

I am a secular man who believes in inclusion, so balance comes across organically.

I want every Israeli child, secular and religious, to know about Moses, about Maimonides, about Yoni Netanyahu, about Hannah Senesh and S. Y. Agnon. I want every child to know how to read the Bible, and know how to make Kiddush.

In our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths, superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apocalyptic nightmares can be projected and played out.

It can have a secular purpose and have a relationship to God because God was presumed to be both over the state and the church, and separation of church and state was never meant to separate God from government.

I think that the secular work environment in general is a place that’s challenging for Christians to thrive in without getting caught up in materialism or in competitiveness or in things that are really not important.

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.

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.

Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.

My musical influences growing up were limited to Korean folk songs and hymns as I went to a Christian boarding school where I was not allowed to listen to secular music.

It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.

You grow up and recognise that in an educated, secular society, there’s no excuse for ignorance. You have to recognise in yourself, and challenge yourself, that if you see racism or homophobia or misogyny in a secular society, as a member of that society, you should challenge it. You owe it to the betterment of society.