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Quotes About Secular

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
Music had shown that it could now articulate, reflect and project a sense of an established secular order – hence allowing the absolutist polemics of Lully's court operas – and yet also be the mouthpiece of a radical sense of often beleaguered individuality. By 1700 music had developed techniques capable of dividing and ordering time and of holding the attention of its listeners in ways that would have been impossible a century earlier.
~ John Eliot Gardiner
The recognition of human insignificance did not, as one might have expected, enhance the role of divine agency in explaining human affairs: it had just the opposite effect. It gave rise to a secular consciousness that, for better or for worse, placed the responsibility for what happens in history squarely on the people who live through history
~ John Lewis Gaddis
The religious character was a sufficient objection — their character of prayer. Mr. Dilke begged me once, while I was writing for him, to write the name of God and Jesus Christ as little as I could, because those names did not accord with the secular character of the journal!
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Two subsequent Franciscans would use Aristotle to push secular knowledge to new intellectual altitudes Thomas Aquinas never imagined. The first was Roger Bacon. He was born around 1215, the same date as the Magna Carta.
~ Arthur Herman
If these words have a familiar sound, it is because they are not from Ockham or Gerson, but from Thomas Jefferson. They come from the most influential summary of medieval conciliarist doctrine in its secular form: the American Declaration of Independence.
~ Arthur Herman
translation of the New Testament in 1516. By exposing many of the errors of the old Latin Vulgate, Erasmus established a new appreciation for "pure Scripture" as the final authority on all things spiritual as well as many secular.
~ Arthur Herman
Renaissance Florence did not forget about the importance of Christianity and sacred values. It was said that Manetti knew three works by heart: the Ethics of Aristotle, Saint Paul's letters, and Augustine's City of God.17 Still, the Florentines did insist that education needed to reflect the new secular emphasis on human freedom and the pursuit of excellence for its own sake.
~ Arthur Herman
Además, en aquel tiempo la justicia seglar era tan cruel como la eclesiástica, y las gentes también lo eran, por incultura y por afición natural del vulgo a ver descuartizar al prójimo.
~ Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Jinnah's "Pakistan" did not entail the partition of India; rather it meant its regeneration into an union where Pakistan and Hindustan would join to stand together proudly against the hostile world without. This was no clarion call for pan-Islam; this was not pitting Muslim India against Hindustan; rather it was a secular vision of a polity where there was real political choice & safeguards, the India of Jinnah's dreams, a vision unfulfilled but noble nonetheless.
~ Ayesha Jalal
Comic book readers tend to be pretty secular and anti-authoritarian; nothing is above satire in their eyes.
~ G. Willow Wilson
I realised that the idea of enforcing sharia is not consistent with Islam as it's been practised from the beginning. In other words, Islam has always been secular, and I had been totally ignorant of the fact.
~ Maajid Nawaz
I had a left-wing, humanitarian, secular humanist, liberal inclination on the one hand, which implied positions on myriad issues. On the other I had prejudices and angers and hatreds toward various classes of people. None of which included skin colour or ethnicity or religion. Well—religion, yes. I used to get angry at blue-collar right-wingers, but that passed, because I saw that in the end, they were just a different sort of victim.
~ George Carlin
Every Christmas now for years, I have found myself wondering about the point of the celebration. As the holiday has become more ecumenical and secular, it has lost much of the magic that I remember so fondly from childhood.
~ Whitley Strieber
If there is a national, secular religion in the United States, it is the belief that America is the Land of Opportunity, that we are a meritocracy, that any kid, no matter who they are, or where they come from, can work hard and move up in the world: that their effort matters.
~ Caterina Fake
I have no idea where the concept came from that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can't find it in the Constitution, and I don't like it being shoved down my throat.
~ Ben Stein
The road to the sacred leads through the secular.
~ Abraham Joshua Heschel
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
If children could grow up in innocence and safety, without the threat of sexual indoctrination and values-shaping dogma from secular public opinion in their classrooms.
~ Sally Clarkson
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
Private religious speech can't be discriminated against. It has to be treated equally with secular speech.
~ Samuel Alito
Enter Madeleine. Here was a Christian author who could function quite unperturbedly from inside paradox, who dared to question the assumption that all things must be either/or. Why can't it be both/and? What is this nonsense about "secular"? Why can't God use those things if God wants to? Why can't God speak through this or that person (if God can speak through a donkey, for instance)? Who says?
~ Sarah Arthur
There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation. Walking on Water
~ Sarah Arthur
Deflation and secular stagnation are the risks of our time.
~ Lawrence Summers