Secular Society Quotes:

According to one influential wing of modern secular society there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being 'like everyone else' for 'everyone else' is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people should be to mark themselves off from the crowd and 'stand out' in whatever way their talents allow.

- Alain de Botton

topic: Fate, Thinking, Secular Society

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).

- Alain de Botton

topic: Museums, Secular Society, Ideas

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.

- Susan Sontag

source: "Styles of Radical Will" by Susan Sontag, (p. 45), 1966.

topic: Art, Secular Society, Tasks, Autonomous

A church has the right to set its own standards within its community. I don't think it has a right to prohibit birth control or to enforce upon a secular society its conception of divorce and the indissolubility of the marriage tie.

- Reinhold Niebuhr

source: "The Mike Wallace Interview". www.hrc.utexas.edu. April 27, 1958.

topic: Divorce, Thinking, Secular Society

The demand that Islam makes of women is to not attract attention to yourself, and if you are in a secular society, that attire does exactly that, and it is a political symbol, no longer religious.

- Ayaan Hirsi Ali

source: "The Interview: Ayaan Hirsi Ali on reforming Islam". Interview with Brian Bethune, www.macleans.ca. April 13, 2015.

topic: Religious, Secular Society, Political

Within the field of a secular society, which is a sort of neutral frame that allows individuals to develop their own lives, so long as they don't annoy their neighbors too much, each of us has an individual myth that's driving us, which we may or may not know.

- Joseph Campbell

source: Joseph Campbell (2009). “Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation: Easyread Large Edition”, p.145, ReadHowYouWant.com

topic: Secular Society, Long, May

With the time, yes we can be worried, because the secular state should reflect secular society, and this secular society, with the time, if you don't get rid of those terrorists and these extremists and the Wahabi style, of course it will influence at least the new and the coming generations.

- Bashar al-Assad

source: Source: legrandsoir.info

topic: Yes We Can, Secular Society, Style

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

source: "Now" with Bill Moyers, www.pbs.org.

topic: Secular Society, Different, Way, Center Stage

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

- James Madison

source: Virginia. General Assembly. House of Delegates, J. W. Randolph, James Madison (1850). “The Virginia Report of 1799-1800: Touching the Alien and Sedition Laws; Together with the Virginia Resolutions of December 21, 1798, Including the Debate and Proceedings Thereon in the House of Delegates of Virginia and Other Documents Illustrative of the Report and Resolutions”, p.136

topic: Exercise, Secular Society, Law, Redress, Founding

The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason: The Morning Daylight appears plainer when you put out your Candle.

- Benjamin Franklin

topic: Morning, Eye, Atheism, Anti Religious, Religious Faith

A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

- Albert Einstein

topic: Death, God, Wisdom, Anti Religious, Intelligence And Education

I can't tell Black people to fight a war that is Israel's war. What kind of leader will you be, or should I be, to allow these babies Black, white and brown, to fight Israel's war, because Zionists dominate the government of the United States of America and her banking system.

- Louis Farrakhan

topic: Baby, Religious, War, State Government, Deist

As the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen [Muslims] ... it is declared ... that no pretext arising from religious opinion shall ever product an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.... The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation.

- John Adams

topic: Christian, Country, Religious, State Government, Deism

There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages.

- Ruth Hurmence Green

topic: Atheist, Fear, Dark, Dark Ages, Religion In Society

The Church says the Earth is flat. But I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow on the Moon. And I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church.

- Robert Green Ingersoll

topic: Faith, Moon, Religion, Theism, Religious Faith

If I were a dictator, religion and state would be separate. I swear by my religion. I will die for it. But it is my personal affair. The state has nothing to do with it. The state would look after your secular welfare, health, communications, foreign relations, currency and so on, but not your or my religion. That is everybody's personal concern!

- Mahatma Gandhi

topic: Spiritual, Communication, Looks, Foreign Relations, Secular Society

Religions are all alike- founded upon fables and mythologies.

- Thomas Jefferson

topic: Religious, Atheist, Religion, Anti Religious, Theism

Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.

- Benjamin Franklin

topic: Spiritual, Atheist, Science, Lighthouse, Atheistic

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.... During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.

- James Madison

topic: Religious, Ignorance, Pride, Shackles, Deism

Man would indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

- Albert Einstein

topic: Men, Rewards, Way, Science Religion, Modern Physics

The public school has become the established church of secular society.

- Ivan Illich

topic: Education, School, Church, Public School, Secular Society

The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion.

- Ulrich Beck

source: "Risky business" by Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. February 11, 2006.

topic: Overcoming, Assumption, Secular, Secular Society

Religion says earn your life. Secular society says create your life. Jesus says, 'My life for your life.

- Timothy Keller

topic: Life, Faith, Christian, Jesus Love, Following Jesus

In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.

- John Taylor Gatto

topic: Taken, Teaching, School, Secular Society, Secularism

The Soviet Union began by banishing God. The United States began as a community of people who wanted to worship God as they chose. . . Man does not live by bread alone. Those in the United States whose desire to create a strictly secular society is as strong as Lenin's was should study this Cold War lesson closely. Communism was defeated by an alliance spearheaded by 'one nation under God.'

- Richard M. Nixon

topic: Strong, War, Men, One Nation Under God, Soviet

Where are the vehicles to character development in secular society?

- Dennis Prager

topic: Character, Development, Vehicle, Character Development, Secular Society

Britain, relative to the U.S., is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past.

- Jonathan Sacks

topic: Past, Government, Gaps, Cutbacks, Secular Society

We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.

- Alain de Botton

topic: Letting Go, Struggle, Choices, Secular Society

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.

- Tom Hiddleston

topic: Dream, Unique, Superhero, Apocalyptic, Different Faiths

It's been so long now and so much has happened that I am able now to look back with much less emotion and my take on Andy as an artist now comes down to a simple sentence: he made religious art for a secular society which is why it has so much appeal.

- Bob Colacello

source: Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

topic: Religious, Art, Simple, Religious Art, Secular Society

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

topic: Christian, Religious, Educational, Secular Society